The latest album from a beloved high desert band took more than a decade to create.
The Blank Tapes released their latest album, Lost Weekend, in early January. It’s 18 tracks and nearly 80 minutes of musical bliss, venturing through sonic journeys such as Beatles-esque sky-high psych and folk on “Dumped,” road-trip country vibes on “Is It Worth It” and Grateful Dead-inspired laid-back blues on “I’m Invisible.”
During a recent phone interview with multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Matt Adams, the brainchild of The Blank Tapes, he explained how he started the album in 2015.
“It took a long time,” Adams said. “I knew it was going to take a long time, but it took a couple years longer than I wanted. The pandemic kind of slowed things down, and other things in life. I have a problem where I just record a lot of stuff, and sometimes we’ll record an album and not finish it and then start recording another one. I basically did that with multiple albums. Over the course of the 10 years, I’ve released maybe 10 albums, so I just kind of see whichever one is almost done, and whichever one seems right to release.”
Adams periodically checked in and tweaked bits and pieces of Lost Weekend over the past decade.
“I started it in 2015 and was just kind of chipping away at it every few months,” he said. “I do the vocals, and then a few months have passed, and I do some guitar. With this particular album, I was generally working with someone else, so … it took a little bit of coordinating and then finding time when I wasn’t working on my other albums. … In a way, it kind of helps, because my tastes develop over the years, and sometimes when I’m listening to it, a year will pass, and the album will just kind of collect dust for a little bit, and then I’ll brush it off and listen to it and hear it differently.”
Adams said the album’s size also kept him from completing it in a timely manner.
“It was such a massive album, 18 songs, and a few of them are really long, extended jams,” he said. “It was sometimes a little overwhelming for me to process all of it, so I’d kind of get reintroduced to it and hear it with fresh ears, and listen to what needed to be done and what needed to be finished or what it was missing. Every year, I would just chip away at it, and up until the last few months, I was adding a couple of things here and there.”
Adams eventually found himself working with “a relic of the past.”
“It’s kind of crazy sometimes when I think about where it was in my life, and what the world was like 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s an interesting thing … the longer time goes on, the more it becomes dated. With a lot of my stuff, I’m not really too concerned with current trends, and only occasionally do I mention current events that are going on. A lot of the songs on the album were about particular instances in my life, and it was almost like the farther I got away from it, the better it was to just be distanced from it emotionally.”
Adams said he also had to work up the courage, in a sense, to release his lengthiest and jammiest body of work yet.
“I’ve released albums in the past that have been a little slower … but I’m more known for the upbeat, psychedelic rock or the pop with folk and surf and all that,” he said. “I knew it was going to be somewhat of a wild card, releasing it—not that people wouldn’t accept it, but it was a departure from a lot of the other stuff I’ve been releasing recently.”
“I’ve always personally loved big, sprawling albums—like the Magnetic Field’s 69 Love Songs, or the Clash’s Sandinista!, or The White Album—that let the band stretch out a little bit.”
Matt Adams
Even though Adams is sifting through songs that are in some cases more than a decade old, he said he never feels disconnected.
“I’ve always kind of been existing in all parts of my musical life at the same time, in a weird way, even though I’m always writing new stuff,” he said. “In the past year, I’ve made an effort to slow down, because I have literally hundreds of new songs to record that are going to take me a long, long time. … It’s not that hard for me just to go back 5, 10, 20 or 30 years ago to music, even to songs I wrote when I was in high school. … They’re all my babies, in a way. Some of them develop a lot quicker, and some of them are still toddlers that I look after and check in on every now and then.”
His recording lineup—with Adams on electric guitar, Will Halsey (of Sugar Candy Mountain) on drums, Joe Lewis on bass and Connor “Catfish” Gallaher on pedal steel—makes Lost Weekend’s deep track listing and stretched-out jams different from Adams’ previous releases, but the sonics still carry the patented Blank Tapes reverb guitars and soothing vocals.
“I try to have my albums be a 40-minute release, which is a pretty digestible length of time for people to listen to stuff, so this album is basically a double album,” he said. “A lot of these other albums I have are double or even triple albums, and they’re just really unconventional, and in a way, not too commercial. I’ve always personally loved big, sprawling albums—like the Magnetic Field’s 69 Love Songs, or the Clash’s Sandinista!, or The White Album—that let the band stretch out a little bit. I think it’s cool to see that. If I’m a fan of someone, I’m going to appreciate a longer album. In a way, I’m just mostly doing it for myself, but I know certain people who like my music are going to appreciate it.”
The Blank Tapes isn’t the only artistic output from Adams. His captivating pieces of visual art can be found on local concert posters, most notably at Pappy and Harriet’s, and his work has been used by bigger bands and projects.
“A lot of times, I’m spending 12 hours on an illustration for the Grateful Dead, or a music festival, or Pappy and Harriet’s,” he said. “A lot of my art is connected with the music, so it’s usually concert posters or album covers or T-shirt designs. I’m grateful to have that as a source of income, and a whole other life for my creativity—but it took over, in a way, so my music life then had to share a lot of time with doing a ton of artwork. It’s a good problem to have.”
Learn more at theblanktapes.com.