Adam Lempel
One half of Baltimore’s own duo Weekends—Adam Lempel presents the world premiere for the single “Let’s Be Real” made from a Sidrassi Organ & lyrics created from a cluster of text messages. Lempel returns after an Amsterdam sojourn spent on a houseboat writing songs that offer vignettes of light & life insights into the human condition with a bedroom pop style ballad produced by Friso Hoekstra with mixin/mastering by Wessel Oltheten. Amour in the age of electronic relay is reproduced from composite text sketches where life lived in real time is exhibited through steady streams of sentimental (and often humorous) dialogues & observations.
A collaboration with Dutch producer Friso Hoekstra, Adam Lempel connects fragments of DMs, text exchanges & Skype’d quips together in a jubilant & joyous celebration of lives connected via mediums that reach across from sea to shining seas. “Let’s Be Real” fervently requests a kind of immediate authenticity that seeks something beyond the superficiality & facades that people put in person & their online public avatars. Adam channels a trove of clandestine & often embarrassing items involving binge-watching “Teen Mom”, hesitations about using a friend’s bathroom & a whole lot more that will bring a smile to your face every time. “Let’s Be Real” allows you to vicariously live through Lempel’s escapist adventures in the Netherlands where the feeling of late night convo & personal dialogues bring about a fireplace type of glow & warmth to keep that summer feeling swimming right through ebb & tide of autumn as it flows into the icy tributary of winter. Adam allows the audience in on cleverly arranged clusters of privy discourse done via the communicative tools of our time that underscores semblances of the human spirit that can can be applied & coveyed through the digital devices that we take for granted here in the modern age.
Adam Lempel shared the following exclusive thoughts on the making of the fun new single “Let’s Be Real”:
I wrote “Let’s Be Real” by collaging together texts and Facebook messenger chats between me and a romantic partner in New York while I was living in a garage in Amsterdam Noord. I had this kind of dingy room with a mattress that kind of made me itch, but I couldn’t tell if it was just in my head [laughs], I’m embarrassed about that detail, anyways the mattress was on concrete floor with walls that didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling and at times it could feel a little bleak. I guess as an escape, I was spending a lot of time in the virtual world and Skype-ing with my friend back in NY. I think every relationship is kind of like that where you create this shared world together, sharing memories, and funny experiences. From the outside, a lot about relationships can be kind of embarrassing, but when you’re in the midst of it it feels really epic. I wanted to capture the inside-jokey-ness, in the words of my friend, the visual artist Lindsay Carone, that soaring, new-love, witty banter filled, inside-jokey type of conversation that exists in your back pocket by way of your phone that nobody can see from the outside.
The production is a collaboration between me and the Dutch producer Friso Hoekstra, and it was mixed by Wessel Oltheten also in the Netherlands. The cover art is by Jeffrey Scudder, whose work I love, and I am so happy that he was able to contribute his drawing for the cover.
Adam Lempel’s new single “Let’s Be Real” is available now via Spotify & Soundcloud.
