Adam’s World Weekly 2/16

I’ve been writing about music for 25 years, and I’ve always loved discovering new artists, and being someone’s first interview. I still get a thrill from seeing a band in a tiny venue, and being so wowed I need to tell the world about them.

Over the past half dozen or so years, I’ve developed second passion, and it’s almost the complete opposite – I love to dig through old records to find new stories.

I’ve always been a music history buff. I was raised on oldies radio, and I’m the owner of an ever-growing library of artist memoirs, and music history books (the number has reached triple digits), because I love learning new info through research (yeah, I’m a nerd. Not exactly a newsflash). When you combine those things with my trips to various record stores to spend hours going through used vinyl, it makes sense that it would all come together in my work at some point.

That point began somewhere around 2019 when I picked up a copy of Sesame Street Fever, and decided I didn’t want to just write about it, I wanted to find someone who was involved with the project, and ask them about it … and I made it happen.

I had no idea if anyone would care about the article other than me, but I knew that whenever I felt that way about an article it somehow found an audience. Heck, I was also working on a complete history of MC Skat Kat at the time, so I was down for niche (and the Skat Kat article ended up huge!).

This desire to find amazing, an oftentimes untold, or long-forgotten, stories from music’s past also led me to launch my monthly One Hit Wondering column back in 2022, which has now been going strong for nearly four years, with a book in the works.

Going back into the crates of used vinyl, over the years my newfound passion led to me tracking down the British rock band Romeo’s Daughter for an interview, because I picked up their album after seeing it was produced entirely by Mutt Lange, and John Parr.

Similarly, after finding a signed copy of an album by a band name Shananagans I tracked them down to get the story on the very unique inscriptions they wrote.

This brings me to my latest find – The Brandos. I’d seen their debut album sitting the B section at The Archive for months. After doing a little research on them, I discovered they were an ‘80s rock band that was based in NYC. Combine that with with fact that the copy of the album at The Archive had a classic St. Mark’s Sounds sticker on it, and I finally added it to my stack during my most recent trip.

After giving the album a listen I dug a little deeper, and became fascinated with lead singer David Kincaid’s story. He began his career in Seattle, made his way to the stage at CBGB in NYC, and now rediscovers long lost Irish-American songs of the Civil War.

Of course, I immediately tracked him down, and set up an interview.

That interview leads off this week’s update.

In addition to that feature, I also have a Pop Shots that takes a look at the charts from this week back in 1991, and a fresh NYC Scene Report with three new tunes from the city’s indie scene.

Read the full interview here

Read the full column here

Read the full column here

As always, thanks for reading, and have a great week!

– Adam Bernard