For the latest entry in the SWT Interviews series, I interviewed New York-based artist Adam Goldberg. You might already be familiar with Goldberg through many of his acting and directing credits over the past three-plus decades. He’s made a lasting impression in supporting roles in film such as Pvt Stanley “Fish” Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Mike Newhouse in Dazed and Confused, and stars as co-lead character Jack opposite Julie Delpy in her underappreciated 2 Days in Paris. He’s also had noteworthy supporting roles in TV shows including his memorable performance as Chandler’s crazy roommate Eddie in Friends, the messy “Nicky” Nick Rubenstein in Entourage, hitman Grady “Mr. Numbers” Numbers prominently in the first season of the outstanding TV series Fargo, and as part of the main cast as character Harry Keshegian in The Equalizer. He’s also directed and written films like Scotch and Milk (1998), I Love Your Work (2003), and No Way Jose (2015).
While those achievements on film may have been in the brightest spotlights, Goldberg has shown he’s just as passionate and talented as a singer-songwriter and musician. He not only composed but also arranged the music for his film I Love Your Work alongside Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips, scored No Way Jose, and the travelogue documentary Running with the Bulls, which ran on IFC.
His first music project was LANDy, and their self-titled debut was released in 2009. However, a quick Google search not long after led him to realize that the name was quite common in the music industry. He quickly pivoted to a new name, The Goldberg Sisters. He picked the new name to to reflect his varied artistic expressions and family connections.
He wanted to create a more whimsical, less personal identity, incorporating the idea of “sisters” (like his alter-ego “Celeste”) to signify collaborators and different voices, rather than just himself, as described in his 2011 interviews with Magnet Magazine and The Skinny.
On the band’s Bandcamp page, James Christopher Monger says The Goldberg Sisters “specialize in moody, multi-textural psych-pop in the vein of the Kinks, Mind Games-era John Lennon, Flaming Lips, and Mercury Rev.” Other descriptors could be alternative, electronic, rock, dream pop, and psychedelic folk. It’s an eclectic sonic mix further cementing him as a versatile artist capable of adapting on the fly.
The Goldberg Sisters have released an album nearly every seven years amidst Adam’s acting/writing/directing/producing/raising a family schedule: the self-titled The Goldberg Sisters (2011) and Home: A Nice Place to Visit (2018). On February 20th, the third album under The Goldberg Sisters moniker, titled When the Ships of My Dreams Return, arrives.
Unlike past releases where’d he’d bring in an outside producer and backing band, Goldberg ultimately decided to perform, record, and mix the entirety of the album on his own.
Below is the album press release’s description of the album and how it came to be:
“Goldberg recorded Home: A Nice Place to Visit about a year after his first son was born — a milestone that signaled a slowdown when it came to his creative pursuits: ‘In the past, I’d carve out time to make music before going off to do an acting job. There was a finite period of time in terms of the limitations I’d put on the recording process.’ Alongside his acting career, Goldberg’s increasingly involved family life resulted in him wondering if he’d ever return to making music again. ‘I’m doing it for myself, oftentimes just with myself,’ says the multi-instrumentalist. ‘It used to be that I couldn’t stop making music — it wasn’t really a choice. I often felt like it was a compulsory intrusion.’
Two years ago, however, work on When the Ships of My Dreams Return started in earnest as Goldberg and his family got settled into their new home in New York. ‘I was just setting up loop pedals and playing around with electronic drums,’ he recalls. ‘One thing led to another, and I was like, ‘Well, I guess I made a demo.’’ That song in question is the euphoric psych-pop gem ‘Our Kind of Love,’ and its free-flowing emergence inspired Goldberg to continue writing while reaching out to longtime friend and collaborator Aaron Espinoza, of seminal indie-rockers Earlimart, for some engineering guidance, which resulted in Goldberg embracing a truly DIY approach. While Goldberg had played most everything on his last couple of records as well as self-recording several demos, he had never done it all entirely alone.
Piece by piece, Goldberg found himself essentially building a studio – a part of the process which in a sense, he says, ‘became as essential to the experience as the songwriting and recording itself.’ He adds, ‘I had always just stopped short of doing everything from soup to nuts. And while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, nor would I necessarily ever do it again, I felt it really freed me up creatively.’
Featuring impressively varied textures and sounds that were formed from a trove of vintage synths and recording equipment that Goldberg acquired across the creative process, the album is a direct reflection of his creative spirit. Thematically, the record often approaches the ever-present feeling of operating at a temporal remove in society – at a crucial moment in which tech and interconnectivity tends to make us feel more isolated than ever before.”
You can stream the album below:
We recommend starting with the below two songs:
You can watch SWT’s entire interview with Goldberg here on our YouTube channel.
And while you’re there, please subscribe and check out more SWT Interview entries as well as our Water Tower Sessions series.
You can follow and listen to Adam Goldberg and The Goldberg Sisters at the following links:
Adam’s website: AdamGoldberg.com/
Instagram: Instagram.com/goldbergsisters
Facebook: Facebook.com/thegoldbergsisters/
Apple Music: The Goldberg Sisters on Apple Music
Spotify: The Goldberg Sisters on Spotify
Bandcamp: Thegoldbergsisters.bandcamp.com/
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
