Adam Lempel Lets Loose "Let's Be Real" Composed from Facebook Messages, Texts & Skype Chats (Produced By Friso Hoekstra)
Adam Lempel is a song-writer, composer, and musician currently living in Queens, New York via Amsterdam and Baltimore. Lempel is one half of Baltimore Art-Rock/Noise band WEEKENDS. I can still vividly remember meeting Adam and his bandmate Brendan Sullivan at now-defunct South Philly venue First Unitarian Church sometime between the releases of WEEKENDS (2008) and Strange Cultures (2011.) WEEKENDS were then-signed to Friends Records and were opening for Surfer Blood on their Astro Coast US tour. Somehow, my buddy and I ended up missing WEEKENDS' opening set, but I still managed to sneak back into the venue's "greenroom" AKA church pews for a Monster-sized canned beer with Adam & Brendan before Surfer Blood's headlining set. Since then, Adam Lempel moved to Amsterdam for a few years to pursue a Masters in Music Design at Hogeschool voor Kunsten Utrecht.
WEEKENDS have been on hiatus for a number of years now and Lempel released three solo albums and various projects including, but not limited to "STILL LIFE," Adam Lempel & The Heartbeats, Adam Lempel & The Casiobeats, and "You Belong with Me" EP. He's since completed his degree and moved back to Queens/Baltimore and is currently working on his proper follow-up to 2016's "STILL LIFE;" in fact, just this past week, Adam Lempel emailed me with his latest musical creation, "Let's Be Real." "Let's Be Real" was recently featured within IMPOSE's 10/27 edition of Week In Pop and is now available to stream and download on Apple Music, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, and other like-minded digital retailers. Here's what Adam Lempel had to say about the creative process and slightly unorthodox construction behind "Let's Be Real." Lempel also casually mentioned within our recent email conversations that a collection of "new WEEKENDS tracks are also on the way."
"It's from an upcoming up album, that will probably come out [early] next year. It's collaboration with the producer Friso Hoekstra, who is a friend of mine from Holland. The song is constructed from text messages and Facebook Messenger chats from conversations with a romantic partner, who was back in the US, while I was living in a garage in Amsterdam-Noord and sleeping on an itchy mattress on the floor. I was having song-writer's block and couldn't come up with any lyrics and I realized I was sitting on a trove of lyrical material already written down in the form of my chats. I would then, go to the gym and sit by the pool, transcribing all of my chats to my notebook, and then, collage them together and re-arrange them into a more abstract and emotionally-resonant form. It felt like a creative breakthrough, at the time and I was also happy how it conveyed the weird and quotidian moments of day-to-day conversation. Beware and be prepared: there are other songs like this on the way!"
- Adam Lempel