The Goldberg Sisters Interview: Jumping Back and Forth in Time
Adam Goldberg; Photo by Daniel Silbert
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Adam Goldberg has had perhaps the most unassuming multi-decade music career one could have. Yes, he's much better known as an actor, having appeared in the likes of Dazed and Confused and Saving Private Ryan as well as indies 2 Days in Paris and cult classic The Hebrew Hammer. Take a listen and look back at his albums, though, and you'll see Goldberg has achieved a level of success, if spread out, to reflect the splendor of his compositions. His debut album, released under the moniker LANDy, was recorded with ex-Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd and various members of The Black Pine. After changing the project name to The Goldberg Sisters, Goldberg dropped his sophomore record on venerable then-indie label PIAS and performed on The Late Show With Craig Ferguson. His last album, 2018's Home: A Nice Place to Visit, was released in conjunction with a book of Goldberg's photography and featured legendary English singer-songwriter Bridget St. John on a track. Yet, as eight years in real time equals many more in the Internet age, it's easy to see why the music listening public might have forgotten about The Goldberg Sisters.
In 2023, Goldberg's riffing started forming the initial outlines of an album. His family's supposed-to-be-temporary move from Los Angeles to the Hudson Valley had become permanent. In hindsight, it was the perfect time for a long break from music to be over, for Goldberg to build a studio and make an entire record himself. Ironically, his most insularly made collection of songs resulted in his hugest sounding album. The subject matter of When the Ships of My Dreams Return, out tomorrow, is highly specific, equally referring to past decades and the past few years. Opener "The Spirit of '76" and the closing, title track recall his childhood home with his mother after her divorce from his father, including details such as the nearby liquor store and the stained glass window with etched text that gives the album its title. "The Great Resignation" describes the common pandemic-era trend of middle-to-upper-class liberals romanticizing a relocation to less-crowded, rural areas, only to find that their politics don't match in an epoch when everything is political. ("We didn't come for your guns, but we gave it a shot / Now we're priced out of our downtown loft," Goldberg sings.) "Call of the Wild" concerns Goldberg's unique experience as a left-leaning, secular Jew post-October 7th, one who remains critical of Israel's government but has been the recipient of virulent anti-Semitic harassment for years prior.
The best songs on Where the Ships of My Dreams Return, however, are emotionally tender and abstract. "Échale La Culpa a Rio", its title a Google English-to-Spanish translation of the 1984 film Blame it On Rio, is a tribute to his late friend, actor Rio Hackford; it juxtaposes sampled conversation and a quiet, cooing vocal turn with Goldberg's consistent palette of drum machine and delayed, harmonic synths. The literally titled “Driving with Elliott, Mark, and David on the PIP in December", about Goldberg finally coming back to the discography of three of his favorite songwriters who all happened to take their own lives, spotlights washy, chiming synths and syncopated acoustic guitar alongside Goldberg's gentle, rich singing, all the while leaving plenty of room for stillness. The concise "Everybody Is Dying" sports a minimal combination of synth and acoustic guitar, Goldberg a dead ringer for Wayne Coyne, its all-encompassing title an evergreen sentiment. And sure, the silly "Athleisure!" and diatribe against technology-induced isolation "Content" (when Goldberg sings, "There's a party raging inside my phone," he manages to make a familiar and tired feeling sound newly terrifying) stand out. Nevertheless, nothing prepares you for the 14-minute title track, whose runtime is extended due to bouts of silence and studio chatter, like the closers of past Goldberg Sisters albums. In other words, the song is not just a thematic callback to the title-mentioning opener but a shared sonic motif within that under-appreciated, spaced-out musical career of Goldberg's, as if to remind you of what you've let slip out of your brain this whole time.
Two weeks ago, Goldberg spoke to me over Zoom from his studio about the making of the album, why he doesn't often play live, and allowing himself to be sad while listening to Elliott Smith and Sparklehorse. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: In making When the Ships of My Dreams Return, you were trying not to be influenced by anything specific or go for a specific sound. Still, was there something around the time of making the record that inspired the wide variety of sounds on the album, or the reflective nature of it?
Adam Goldberg: I don't know. If you've listened to everything I've done, there's a sound there that tends to overlap...There's always this kind of sprawling nature in which I'm exploring different influences. I don't think [this album] that different, particularly the first couple tracks that I recorded. As time went on a little bit, I was utilizing different tools to write songs than I normally do. I was screwing around a little more with samplers and synthesis. Maybe that influenced some of the other tracks. Honestly, it seems like on most of the stuff that I've done, some songs are written just by noodling around on a guitar, others I have a very clear intention of what I want to say, and still other ones are just drum beats and loops and I put together a musical landscape and then come up with some kind of lyrical content to put on top of it. Every once and a while, I have a very clear idea, [like,] "I want this to sound like a Dionne Warwick-Burt Bacharach orchestration," and I try to somehow get something that sounds like it. Sometimes, it's something I'm doing, and it's a totally generative process and I just sort of follow it as it goes.
SILY: As a whole, When the Ships of My Dreams Return is not a concept record, but there are a lot of segues and sonic and thematic bookends within songs and the album. How was coming up with the sequencing and overall arc of the album?
AG: At some point, I thought four tracks in [writing it] that there was a recurring theme. At the time, that theme seemed to be heavily influenced by social media. I thought four tracks into it that the record would be called Content, which is [the name of] one of the songs. I thought of [the song] as the centerpiece of it, and it was also the track that was most out of my wheelhouse in terms of how it was written. The groundwork was laid on this weird synthesizing drum machine. It's very strange: It's a lot of touch-plates and touch-tables and things. At the end of the day, my intention certainly wasn't to make a sprawling, hour-long record about the influence of social media. I was definitely influenced by whatever was going on socially, politically, or personally at the time, which is probably always the case.
Sonically, what I started to realize was that there was this bookend the record had, the first one being the first track in the sequence, "The Spirit of '76", about a very specific moment in my childhood with my mom and my parents getting divorced. The whole record title and cover and my back tattoo, When The Ships of My Dreams Return, was a glass window in my house growing up. It occurs in the first track and the last track, the title track, and it goes on this trippy, hallucinatory flashback to my life in that house. In the end, there were three themes that ended up recurring: the influence of social media on living, my childhood, and [death.] There's been a lot of death in my life the last several years. Mortality is probably always the centerpiece of my existential life, but it definitely became less of a theoretical or philosophical concept and more of a reality...I've had friends die young, and a lot of heroes seem to be dropping dead.
SILY: In trying to tie those three themes together in my head, I came up with "a tension between the past and the present, the old and new," that permeates the album, even in the juxtaposition of acoustic and electric instrumentation, and the themes.
AG: Totally. That's the underlying theme of my life, if I were to encapsulate it. I'm writing a book, which is essentially a memoir but framed in a fictional way. I guess any time someone writes about their past, you're automatically having to reconcile those tensions. But it's very much about how from an early age I was jumping back and forth in time, and not feeling totally present, and living in this ethereal state.
[On] my second record, The Goldberg Sisters, I left a lot of the studio detritus in at the bookends of each song, but in this case, I was much more intentionally creating soundscapes where you wouldn't necessarily know where one song ended and another began. At a certain point when I was recording, I realized I was going to do that, so I ended up leaving some stuff on and recording some elements to tie the various songs together.
SILY: I wanted to ask about the contrast in tone between that of what you're singing about and that of the music. Do you, too, see a contrasting pattern, and if so, did you consciously go into the recording wanting to nail it?
AG: Not really, honestly. There are times where I hear it later, and I think, "Oh, maybe there's an irony there that wasn't necessarily intentional." "Our Kind of Love" was a loop I was messing around with, and it was just what came out of my mouth. Everybody does this, but sometimes you leave in the temp lyrics. They're just consonants. In this case, I left [them] in, but I didn't really have anything to say. I didn't know what that meant. It ended up being extremely ironic, and in that case, there ended up being some intention to it, because I was intentionally not trying to write a sincere love song. It certainly has the feel of something beatific or celebratory. I have a song called "Shush" that was as close to you could get as being popular [laughs], and another called "Bff!". Those are the two that are these big dream rock, dream pop songs, and they're very vitriolic but have a very jaunty vibe to them. I'm not trying to be Joy Division, but [making them upbeat] feels insincere.
SILY: There are certainly sincere songs on here, like "The Spirit of '76". "The Great Resignation" has a sincerity to it because you're talking about your experience of a time we all went through. It's a common story among people who moved during the pandemic, where one's daily lives and chosen actions ended up being political statements in and of themselves.
AG: Totally. I certainly could have gone much further into that but was trying to use this small town as a microcosm. That's an example of a song where I knew I wanted to write it, and very few instances on this record did I know that was going to happen. That one, I knew it was something I wanted to say and write about, and I knew that it wouldn't begin as sample-based, and it would be a sincerely written song on the piano. It ends up having an ironic upbeat feel to it. I have a limited palette with which I can work, so I knew where I would be chord-wise and octave-wise on the piano. That's a sub-genre within my palette, which seemed to fit the particular theme. Lyrically, 100%, and in general, I was a little more considerate and deliberate than I have been in the past. It's hard to say.
SILY: A song like "Athleisure!", in contrast, you expect to be more satirical, and I find it earnest.
AG: [laughs] It was a joke; my wife came in from playing tennis wearing leggings, and she made some comment about how there should be a song about athleisure. I'm not one of those people who can sing a song and write it [immediately]. I have to sit down and play and hear a song. Maybe I'll occasionally hum something to myself. But this came out fully formed in my head. I just threw it together really fast for fun, and thought I'd put it out under a totally different moniker, just to make my songs even harder to find, or whatever. I said, "Fuck it," because I made it while I was making the record, so I put it on the record. Also, it does call back to the pandemic-era modality of dressing. It was fun, and I had also just gotten a new drum machine, which was a ripoff of the old LinnDrum machine, which was a classic 80's drum machine. I was excited just to get that four-on-the-floor beat going. I was like, "Maybe I can write a summer banger! Let's see!" It still has my kind of studio slop on it. I don't know if it's sincere...but it was definitely fun.
SILY: To me, it sounds sincere not just because it's fun, but because the idea of emphasizing comfort in our day-to-day lives was one of the things that was positive that came out of the pandemic. Like, let's strip away all pretense when it comes to working from home. It's almost a tribute to dismantling norms.
AG: That might be imbuing it with more profundity than I intended, but I'm always happy to have that happen. I can definitely picture that woman and how much fun she's having, which seems like a little bit of a celebration.
SILY: Can you tell me about "Call of the Wild"?
AG: That's a tricky one. I wrote it early on. I don't know how far after October 7th [2023] I wrote that, but it was during a period where I was trying to reconcile a lot of pretty heavy feelings about being Jewish--I'm half-Jewish, but as a late friend of mine once told me, it's the half that runs the show--but being brought up as a Jewish person in America, and being progressive, with a lot of super progressive people around me, and what an incredibly challenging landscape that has been for me to traverse for the last several years. It hasn't gotten any easier. That's all I'll say about it because it's left somewhat intentionally oblique, but it was definitely a personal expression of the challenges of navigating life as an American Jew in a post-October 7th America.
SILY: As a progressive Jew myself, I know what you're going for.
AG: What I'll say, to be slightly less elliptical, is that I had always been really critical of Israel, or at least its government, and my dad was not. [laughs] We would always banter back and forth. October 7th was very upsetting to me as it obviously was to a lot of people. We have a friend who lives in Israel on a kibbutz. Seeing what life was like for her and from her perspective, all my knee-jerk liberalism got rejiggered. It was challenging to navigate.
My publicist wanted that song to be the first single--I mean who cares, it's indie music, [so] the first song released into the ether--but I was like, "Nah, I don't know how to talk about that song, so not a good idea." That's probably another example of a song that feels...not jaunty, but poppy, which makes it ironic, I guess.
SILY: I wouldn't have released it as the first single either because it would probably distract from the rest of the record, but it is worthwhile no matter where you lie politically to say that it's bad when we lose our humanity, and to challenge the usefulness of performative activism. I say that as someone who tends to agree with a lot of what the performative activists say, but not at the point where the selfish intentions outweigh the message.
AG: I'll say this: What sucks is that I am so nervous about talking about it, which is unfair. Two years went by since I recorded it, and shit got really awful in Gaza...also, anti-Semitism got really awful in ways I had been hinting at for years. I've been on the receiving end of an unbelievable amount of anti-Semitism in the social media landscape, starting from the year Trump got elected. I have a photo album in my phone called "Nazis..." People who were self-proclaimed Nazis, whether they [actually] were or weren't, were sending me pictures of old Holocaust imagery and telling me I should burn in an oven, and some of the worst imaginable stuff. [That was] before they cleaned Twitter up, and then of course Elon Musk bought it, and it got unclean, and I left. Anyway, my point is, would I have written the song two years later? No. But I did write it in the direct aftermath of October 7th.
I had been called, interchangeably, a kike and a Zionist on social media for years. "Kike, okay, but I'm not a Zionist!" People don't know or refuse to acknowledge the difference between being a secular Jewish American person and a right-wing proponent of the Israeli government. For the most part, these [insults] were never from the left. These were right-wingers and white supremacists, and "Zionist" was another pejorative word for Jew. It doesn't matter what the actual meaning of that word is: That's the problem. There are well-known Jewish actors and actresses out there who are outspoken anti-Zionists. That's fine--it's just I can almost guarantee you they hadn't been on the receiving end for years and years of people calling them Zionist and kike and Heeb and dirty Jew, interchangeably. I kept talking about this on Instagram. I would say, "You really need to please be careful with your language right now." I'm talking about on October 8th [2023] and 10th. I'm not talking about a year [after October 7th]. "[Be] really careful, because I'm telling you, it's gonna get co-opted by the right." It already has been. It already was before. They got there first. Try, if you can, to be critical of the government. If you're critical of the entire Israeli project, that's fine: You can be! But using shorthand is really really dangerous, because you're using the same language that other people who I know would be happy to see me dead, or at least have said so, have used. That's what that song is about.
It's weird, too, because I'd get these DMs of people saying, "Thank you for speaking up for Israel," and I'd say, "No, that's not exactly what I'm saying here." Other people would say, "You fucking baby killer!" and I'd be like, "Oh my god." It became impossible. There was absolutely no room for nuance. It was an absolutely lose-lose situation for somebody who has any kind of complicated relationship with the subject. Finally, I opted out. It's too bad. I'm horrified by what's going on there, and yet, it was one of the rare instances I felt like I couldn't speak out without feeling like I was somehow betraying my own more complex feelings about it.
SILY: Is “Échale La Culpa a Rio” named after the movie Blame It on Rio?
AG: Yes, it is. I have to admit that my Spanish is way too bad to have come up with [the title] on my own. If anybody asks me what the name of that song is, I just have to say, "Blame It on Rio". It's a song about my old friend Rio Hackford who died a few years ago. He was one of my best friends, and one of the funniest guys of all time. It was the last text he sent me. I knew he had been sick for a long time, and suddenly, he got really sick, and it became clear I had to fly out to L.A. to see him, and I told him I was using it as an excuse to get out of this work-related dinner I didn't want to go to, and he wrote, "Blame It on Rio". He was on his deathbed. That's how fucking funny that guy was.
I used to play music once and a while with him, and I gave him all my music over the years, and he never said anything about it. [laughs] So the song is a little bit giving him shit, but he gets the last laugh.
When the Ships of My Dreams Return cover art
SILY: What's the story behind the cover art?
AG: This was a total departure [from how I usually work,] because I usually like to use my photography, and my wife designs it. That stained glass window was in the stairwell of the house I grew up in from ages 6-13. For some reason, the photos I took disappeared, but I had a screenshot of an Instagram post I made, otherwise I wouldn't have that photo. What had happened was that house was on the street Maryland Drive in L.A., and I would drive by it all the time for my whole life. I had recurring dreams about that house for my entire life. It was a very seminal house. It was the house I moved into with my mom after my mom left my dad...The biggest impressions left on my psyche were made in that house. I always thought about doing that thing where you knock on the door and you see if someone answers, and they'll let you in. I think I did it once, and nobody answered, [but] another time I drove by, and I saw this woman out front, and I was like, "Alright." I pulled over and went up to her, and it turns out she was the interior decorator, and they were remodeling or redesigning the house, so they had all the furniture out of it. She said, "I'll sneak you through," because the owners weren't there. I went through it, and some of the house was different, but much was unchanged, and I went through frantically taking snapshots and all these mental snapshots so that I could remember, and I took a shot of that window. What was wild to me was I always remembered the words on that window saying, "When the ship sails on." What it said was, "When the ships of my dreams return," which was profound because I was constantly dreaming of that house. I was blown away by that. It was archived in a little Instagram story, and that was that.
At some point, [for] this track I made, an instrumental track, I started singing, "When the ships of my dreams return," over the main bass line. One thing led to another, and I knew that would be the record cover art. My wife is an artist, but that's just not her thing at all. It just screamed black velvet to me. There's a guy named Gil Corral, an incredible black velvet painter who actually did one of John Grant's album covers. Before that, I had known him because Rio's wife had commissioned [Corral] to paint Rio's portrait for his 50th birthday, because Rio loved black velvet painting. For my 50th, which was a few months later, my wife Roxanne [Daner] commissioned him for my 50th birthday. I reached out asking him whether he'd be willing to do [the album cover, and he said,] "Yes, of course." It was kind of crazy because I had never designed a record before I finished making the record, and it also meant I was really committed to the title. It was a different way of working. Usually, it's all done, and then you're like, "What's this record called? What should we make it look like?" In a way, it helped me zone in on how the songs should be sequenced. It did become a bit more conceptual.
I did that, and then there's kind of a famous tattoo motif called "Rock of Ages" where there's a woman clinging on to a rock, which is shaped like a crucifix or a cross, and I changed that to an Echoplex, a tape echo which I have, and asked him to paint that based on a painting in a tattoo place I go to called Daredevil Tattoo in New York. I got those two paintings here, and then we designed around that. My wife did the graphic design, but the art is Gil's.
SILY: Do you ever play live?
AG: I did, and I have. I don't like it, I guess, is the short answer. I also don't really have musicians to do it with. I used to have a band before all of this. In the 90's, me and my friend Eric would play with different guys, which was a totally different thing. When I made this record called Landy, before I changed to The Goldberg Sisters, it was a big group of people folding this L.A. band called [The] Black Pine, who I had recorded and played with over the years at their house and studio, and Roxane, and my friend Merritt [Lear] playing violin, and my friend Eric playing bass, and my friend Greg playing keys. I was trying to capture the bigness of the music I was making. We definitely did that for a while.
When the second album came out, The Goldberg Sisters, I put together a smaller version of a band. Actually, we ended up playing on Craig Ferguson, which was crazy, because we didn't play regular gigs. We played here and there at SPACELAND and The Echo in L.A. We went to England, me and Roxane and Andrew Lynch, a big part of the band who also engineered the two prior records, because the second record was picked up by PIAS. They flew us to Europe, and we were doing a loop pedal, sample-based version of these big sprawling songs that were recorded with hundreds of layers. [We were] playing stripped-down versions. Harper Simon was one of my labelmates, and he could play his songs on guitar, and they would sound like great songs. That's how those songs were written and recorded. He's a super facile player. I'm not. I use music as recording implements and songwriting tools. I either need a lot of players around me, or a lot of loops, and I get too stressed out and anxious [playing live], and the cost-benefit isn't worth it. It's not doing anything to necessarily sell the record, and emotionally, it makes me extremely stressed out.
I don't have a group of people I consistently make music with, and in this last case, it was literally just me. I can play, and I've done it. When we did the last record, [Home: A Nice Place to Visit,] we did it as an exhibition because I had put the record out as a vinyl and book of photography. We did an exhibition at this gallery called SHOW Gallery in Los Angeles, and the art was hung on the walls, and me and Andrew did a few versions of the songs. It was fun and cool--I love using all these pedals and effects and samplers, and Andrew is super facile with that stuff. It's cool, and when it works, I think it's really fucking cool, and when it doesn't, I feel horrible, and it's not worth it.
SILY: Is there anything next for you in the short or long term?
AG: Not really. Honestly, I invested a lot of time and creative bandwidth into this project. The only thing I didn't do was master it. My masterer has been the same guy on all the records: Mark Chalecki. Once I was done mixing, I began writing this book. It's not dissimilar to how I began making this record, where I was like, "I don't know if I'm really making a record." I didn't want to put that kind of pressure on myself. I didn't have a studio, and the record was really as much about building a studio and learning how to engineer and mix in a way that I had only done in very crude ways before getting someone who really knew what they were doing involved. It was very much a technical learning process as [it was] a songwriting and musical process. That was a big part of what was satisfying to me about doing this. Sort of similarly, writing this thing, which is very much a book, even though I was letting it sneak up on me, thinking, "I don't know if I'm really writing a book, let's just see what happens," one thing led to the next, and before I realized it, I had written 100 pages. I'm trying to go get jobs as an actor, because that's how I make my living, but in terms of creative pursuits, that's what I'm focused on.
SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading that's caught your attention or inspired you?
AG: I'm always listening to stuff. I kind of feel like I'm always listening to the same stuff. [laughs] It kind of depends. I've been reading a little bit more. My friend John Tottenham, an old poet friend of mine, has written a great book about writing his first novel and working in a bookstore, while he was writing his first novel and working in a bookstore in L.A. It's great. It's called Service. He's an old friend of mind, and we met working at Book Soup a million years ago. He wrote a couple editions of poetry, and if you know him, he's very much a mixture of Eastside Los Angeles, incredibly acerbic wit and brilliantly dour. I also read Long Island Compromise recently, which was a fantastic book that I'm sure they're making into a television series [Editor's Note: Apple TV+ acquired the novel's television rights in 2024], and if I'm not a part of it, I'll be extremely heartbroken. I told that to Taffy [Brodesser-Akner,] the author, because I got to meet her doing a thing at the Paley Center in New York about anti-Semitism. I just finished watching Pluribus, my old castmate Rhea Seehorn's show, which was really great. I gobbled that up.
Music is constant, sprawling, and all over the place. It's always on somewhere. It's hard to get specific about it. I was very late to the Father John Misty party, I guess. That tends to be what happens with me. It's not necessarily new music, I'm just late to something I can't believe I wasn't fully ensconsed in. I think he manages to do this thing, which I think is incredibly challenging, which is making ironic literary music with epic soundscapes. Those are the sorts of things that tend to appeal to me. There's a song on [When the Ships of My Dreams Return] about Elliott Smith, David Berman, and Mark Linkous, who are three artists who took their lives whose music had an enormous impact on me, about being able to revisit their music without being totally crushed by listening to it. Particularly Elliott Smith and Sparklehorse, which were super major influences. I always hate using the word "influence"--I'm just huge fans of their music. I would take these long drives to go to work when I was doing this TV show in Greenpoint, an hour-to-an-hour-and-a-half drive each way, and there was a period of a week or so where I decided to just do it and listen to all the Elliott Smith and Sparklehorse records. It's still very challenging for me to not be very sad. Also, the music was so good, it would overwhelm the sadness.
SILY: Did you hear the Mavis Staples record that came out last year, Sad And Beautiful World? The title track is a cover of the Sparklehorse song. It's a tearjerker.
AG: Ugh. Yeah. There are three times I cried when someone I didn't know--didn't have any personal relationship with--died: Elliott Smith, David Bowie, and Mark Linkous. Bowie [was] on another level since I was a child, but they're so embedded in the musical soundtrack of my life. It felt like losing somebody. I couldn't figure out what to call the track, so it ends up being this obscenely long title that doesn't fit on a streaming website.
