Adam Landry made a ton of records that I love, and several that we featured last year. As the first person who primarily works as a record producer that we have featured on Country Fried Rock, I did not even know that I liked his work until the middle of an interview last season, when it suddenly dawned on me that he was a recurring theme! From #CFRalumni Lilly Hiatt, T. Hardy Morris, Hollis Brown, and Rayland Baxter, to records we have played in our radio show version of CFR, like Diamond Rugs, Middle Brother, and DeerTick, Landry has been the force behind the scenes, helping the songwriters make the records they have inside them.

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Transcript

Sloane: My guest today on Country Fried Rock is Adam Landry, the first time we featured someone who’s known for things way beyond just his own recording. Welcome.
Adam: Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Sloane: I’m not totally sure I’ve ever had the opportunity to be chatting with other folks so many times and suddenly had this dawning in the middle of interviewing someone else of “Oh my God, I’ve played every single record this guy’s produced in the last couple years.”
[Laughter]
Adam: Yeah, I remember listening to your interview, I believe, with, it was either with Hardy or Rayland and you mentioned, “I’m having an Adam Landry year.” It made me smile, I was very proud at that moment.
Sloane: Seriously, it’s kind of a crazy—Hollis Brown, Hardy, Rayland, Lilly Hiatt. I mean, it was like I didn’t mean for that to happen, but apparently I like what you’re doing.
Adam: Cool, cool.
Sloane: So I’ve been listening to stuff that you’ve worked with, both for other people as well as things you put out on your own. And I discovered your record from maybe 2012-ish, El Scorpion.
Adam: Oh, yeah, that was a rare case of me making music. I was going through an interesting—I won’t call it difficult, because everybody has difficult times—but I was going through an interesting period of my life. And decided that I’ve always been a songwriter, I’ve not so much been a performer, and still not, but, I decided that I was going to make this record that I had inside me. Just to intentionally no fanfare, I just wanted to make it for my friends. I had some friends help me with it. Yeah, I’m real happy with it. It’s very off-the-wall. It’s not representative of anything but the time period I was going through at the time.
Sloane: Sure, like a snapshot at any given moment.
Adam: Yeah.
Sloane: I like the grungy-fuzzy sounds and the little psychedelic tints and all that sort of stuff, which I hear through a lot of the stuff you’ve worked on lately.
Adam: Cool.
Sloane: How do things morph into you doing what you’re doing with producing for other folks and then there’s Cosmic Thug Records and y’all have some projects there.
Adam: It’s been really a whirlwind the last couple years, but I started… I won’t bore you with a bunch of boring details. Essentially I moved to Nashville from Portland, Maine in 1997 so I’ve been here for 18 years now. I came down here because it was Music City, USA, and I was into roots music, if you will. I’m one of those guys that came by roots music via British Invasion stuff. I was always obsessed with the early Stones and Beatles records and the British take on American roots music really opened the door for me to find the original stuff, and Nashville was the place to start.
I came down here with the intention of just immersing myself in music and I didn’t really have a clear goal as to what that looked like professionally. I kind of fell into road gigs, playing guitar for people. I played with Allison Moorer for quite a while, and band-led her. It just became apparent really quick to me after I was a professional musician that recording, the recorded music was where I wanted to be.
Sloane: Do you hav