When he’s not singing woozy pop songs about the worries of parenthood and the trials of adulthood, Mike Adams hosts a talk show in Bloomington, Indiana. It began in what looks like somebody’s basement, with a cheery co-host and a laugh track with quote marks around it, but has since become a live event with an actual audience replacing the “studio audience”. As funny and bizarre as it can be, The Mike Adams Show might be little more than a straight parody of late-night television were it not for Adams’ affable chuckle and genuine interest in the lives of his guests, all locals (Pitchfork contributing writer Eric Harvey made an appearance in an early episode).
Adams is a goofball in the best sense, a guy who leads with his sense of humor, and that extends to the music he makes as Mike Adams at His Honest Weight. When he plays with his band, he cavorts across the stage, holding the mic close to his chest and waving a finger in the air to emphasize certain lyrical passages. Recently, he and his band played a live show dressed as priests, complete with clerical collars and crucifix medallions. Part crooner and part pop star, Adams projects an outsize persona from the stage, which he then punctures with his between-song banter. Somehow he manages to come across as both ironic and deeply sincere, goofing on the conventions of pop music (he made this video, after all) even as he embraces them as a means of communicating some deep pain.
His songs aren’t dark, but they are heavy. “I’m Worried”, the first single from Adams’ second album, Best of Boiler Room Classics, was written about the concerns he faced while his newborn son underwent multiple open-heart surgeries. Thankfully neither dour nor blandly life affirming, the song evokes those endless moments of abject worry, with a long, tense instrumental interlude conveying the hand-wringing boredom of a waiting room. Presumably, music assuaged Adams’ fatherly fears: He sneaks in a quote from the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” as though singing an old favorite to himself: “Show me show me show me how you do that trick/ That keeps you calm.” If the theme is harrowing, the tone is anything but: the music is jangly and lush, with pinpricks of guitar jabbing against his vocals that somehow keeps the melody bobbing and buoyant.
Adams’ sense of humor shows through in the exaggerated hooks that pepper Boiler Room Classics. Songs like “Be Free, Live Well” rush excitedly into towering, tumbling choruses, while slower numbers like the brooding “A Woman Is the New Man” and “Don’t Want It, Don’t Get It” follow clean melodic lines, like Bacharach at his most ruminative. On closer “Good Thing Going,” he sounds uncannily like Brian Wilson; on “The Fingers You Know,” like the Byrds. He and his band work with a musical palette that is both broad and specific, blurring the distinctions between *Nuggets-*era rockers, Midwestern power pop, late-night lounge, and ‘80s synth-pop.
Adams is not necessarily concerned with integrating these various styles into something wholly new. Rather, he’s projecting an identity through musical cues, speaking through the shared language of pop. If his touchstones were too obscure or inside-jokey—if they weren’t so much fun—it might sound like he’s only playing to his record collection. Instead, Boiler Room Classics is shot through with deep nostalgia and an even deeper melancholy, as though Adams’ true subject is the fleeting nature of happiness, the impermanence of family and friends. Or, as he sings on one of the album’s sunniest hooks: “We’ve got a good thing going/ So we better get going, before the good thing goes.”
