Photo Credit: Erik Ljung
Before he quietly shared an EP titled Folk Songs to Bandcamp late last month, it had been nearly 20 years since Adam Michael Krause had released anything resembling a singer-songwriter project. He’d begun to expect he might not ever again—not, he says, because of any aversion to the form, but simply because his interests led him elsewhere. In between playing percussion with Group of the Altos and backing Marielle Allschwang in her band, he focused his efforts on a series of solo noise and experimental projects.
“I did one on a label in New York called ‘A People’s History of February 24,’ where I recorded 24 hours of my day and sped it up to 24 minutes,” Krause says. “So that’s been my background before now. I was sort of the weirdo who comes in and does weird stuff for people and does weird, experimental conceptual stuff on my own.”
Over the years, Krause had carved out a satisfying niche for himself. “I just fell into this role where I would play in bands or on people’s recordings when they’d ask, ‘We need some distorted saw on this song,’ or ‘Can you make us some tape loops?’” Krause says. “I’d gotten so deep into experimentation and noise, so I’d do that stuff when bands asked me to, but I wasn’t so much involved in the songwriting process.”
The first song he wrote for Folk Songs, a fluttering, finger-plucked sigh of a tune called “Put Away Childish Things,” came about almost by accident. He’d been working closely with Allschwang on her solo work, which he suspects may have put him more in a songwriting headspace, but he wasn’t expecting to use the song himself. “I had a guitar part and I thought, ‘I’ll present this to Marielle as a potential song,’” he recalls. “Then I hummed something to myself that I thought could be a vocal melody. And then I wrote the words, and I thought, ‘Well, since I wrote a song I better record it so I don’t forget it.’ And so suddenly I had a song that’s me recording and singing the parts all the way through. I could give this to a singer-songwriter to run with the idea, but it was mine now, and it would ring false in someone else’s voice.”
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Folk Songs took shape from there, as Krause expanded on the anti-war themes of that first song, writing a song cycle that juxtaposed human fragility with society’s thirst for confrontation. Most of its songs are fairly naked—often just Krause’s voice and prickly guitar, with periodic backing vocals from Allschwang—though the EP is rarely as straightforward as its title. “Just Like a Seed” and “Put Into the Past Tense” jerk and jostle like Phil Evrum’s tactile early recordings as The Microphones, while the unsettling instrumental “Waltzing Off To War” plays on Krause’s more experimental impulses, casting his guitar against barely audible warmongering sound bites.
This style of songwriting seems to come to Krause so naturally that it’s a surprise it took him so long to record a project like this. But, he explains, he just never saw the need before. “The reality is, when you’re playing in two bands, performing songs and recording records, whatever desire you have to write music and play shows is being entirely satisfied,” he says. “The itch to do it wasn’t there, especially since I could pitch whatever ideas for songs I had to whatever bands I was in.”
Krause says he intends to stay in this lane at least for a little while longer and hopes to release another EP or two this year—or possibly even a full-length album. What he’s not ready to do, though, is perform these songs live. “At this point, it’s still new for me—using my voice as an instrument—and I don’t yet have the confidence to know that I’m going to do a good job,” he says. “I’d hate to have people pay $5 to hear me sing flat for 30 minutes.”Adam Michael Krause’s Folk Songs is streaming at adamkrause.bandcamp.com.
