Why did you change the name of your band from 1401 to the Dan Adams Band?

1401 was a hard name to remember and it was weird on a marquee, people thought it was a date.  Online you had to spell out “one thousand four hundred one” at Amazon.com to order the CD. Actually, the guys decided they wanted the name changed. I was against changing it to my name because people have preconceptions about whether you’re an arrogant person when you have the band named after you. It’s funny because I think Steve and Jeff pushed so hard about it just so they could pick on me about it later. Now if something comes up, they’re like “ask Dan, it’s the Dan Adams Band.”

With you guys it doesn’t seem like an arrogant thing.

We spent a month trying to come up with another name. “Better for Dipping” was one of the goofy names we came up with. We had a list of really crappy band names. It ended up just being my name. One thing people have said is “It reminds me of the Dave Matthews Band.” We’ve got the acoustic guitar and we get compared to them anyway, musically.

Is that a fair comparison?

Not really. In the five years that we’ve been on the road we’ve been compared to rock bands to country bands to you name it.  I think that if people at our shows like us, they equate us to whatever else it is that they like. They’ll say, “You guys remind me of Creed” or Dave Matthews or Hank Williams Jr.  As long as they like the artist they’re comparing us to, we take it as a compliment.

Do you put yourselves in the same category as anybody?

There are so many people that we look up to as song writers. We’ve all brought different things to the table as to what we listen to and try to incorporate into the writing. I listen to a lot of singer-songwriter stuff; Edwin McCain, Shawn Mullins, Angie Aparo. Steve listens to a little bit of everything, a lot of country and jazz, bass players like Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten. Jeff is a big Dave Matthews fan, so he brings some of that Carter Beauford stuff in. I don’t think there’s any one band I would compare us to because we have so many different flavors when we sit down and write.

Most bands don’t want to be compared to other bands. What sets the Dan Adams Band apart from other bands?

We just write what we write. Up until Sean left the band I had never wanted to be the only guitar player. 1401 was a three piece for awhile when I was in Nashville before Sean and Steve started playing in the band. Sean came in and we had a great time playing together but he had some other interests he wanted to pursue. He left the band and it was like “should we start auditioning guitar players or should we just cruise for a while and see what happens?” We chose to cruise for awhile and it turned out to be a neat thing. Being on the road as a pop/rock “power trio” with no electric guitar was strange to begin with. I think over the past two years our writing has evolved.

Was that a conscious evolution?

I don’t think so.  We’ve always taken all of our own interests and molded that stuff into what everybody has heard from us from the Bittersweet Voyage album to the Shadows album – which is a fairly specific sound that we’ve always had. Whatever you listen to as a songwriter is definitely going to influence you. John Mayer has definitely influenced me lately and I listen to a lot of country radio. Story songs have always been what I’ve been most interested in. I think that’s what made me an Edwin McCain fan and a Shawn Mullins fan…because I love story songs.  Country music is chock full of story songs. Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, and country writers like Darryl Scott and Skip Ewing – those guys are just incredible storytellers.  I would like for a lot of that to leak into my writing.

When you listen to music, are you analyzing it or just enjoying it?

A little of both.  I think all musicians do that to some extent. I listen to people who have a gift for words, more than anything else.

You and Steve have been playing together forever.

It’s kind of funny how Steve and I ended up playing together.  Sean Boyd and I were in our first band together when I was in high school – I was 17 and he was 21. When I graduated high school and went off to college, Sean formed a band called Depression Glass.  I finished college, moved to Nashville, and formed 1401. We were getting ready to do our first record, and Sean just – out of the blue – called me and wanted to know what I was doing (musically). I said “I’m going in the studio this weekend, I’ve got this 3-piece band, and we’ve only got 2 days to record. – can you come up and help me with the guitar parts for the album?”  So he came up and recorded with us and it went well.  We had a couple of shows coming up after that, and he played those with us. About that same time, my bass player quit. I called Sean and said, “do you know any bass players?” He said, “I’ve been in this band Blue Flannel with Steve and we left that band, and have been kinda floating around looking for something else to do. Steve could probably come up and do some gigs and see how it goes.”  Steve and I have been playing together for 6 years now.

You’ve been through a few drummers.

We’ve been through several drummers. Jeff’s been playing with us for 3 years. John Camp was with us for about a year.  We were real heavy on the road the year John played with us.  We did 230 shows that year.  Kyle Hussey played some shows with us on the road for a while.  We took him up to Carbondale, IL and some shows in Kentucky.

Wow, y’all have been all over. How did you get those shows? Did you have an agent?

I’ve booked everything this band has ever done.  A lot of time on the phone. Hours and hours on the phone.

How do you know who to call? How do you know what places your band would be appropriate?

I was working at a radio station in Nashville in 96-97 and our station got bought out. They gave me a small severance package and said “we’re not going to be needing you.”  I was like, “well, I’ve got 3 months worth of pay. I can take these 3 months and get this band off the ground.” We had been gigging around Nashville for a year, wanting to make the jump but not really know how. I was just luck, I guess, that I lost my job.  I bought a book called The Musician’s Guide to Touring and Promotion.  It’s a listing of hundreds of clubs listed by state, and subdivided by city, the club, what kind of music they have, the address and the contact name and phone number. So I started cold-calling people.  We hit the road about 6 weeks later and never looked back. We’ve done a couple hundred dates a year every year since then and I’ve booked most of it out of that book.  We’ve developed relationships with all these clubs and they recommend us to other clubs and it has kind of snowballed from there. We play in 13 states and 50 cities on regular rotation.

Do you have a favorite place to play?

My favorite place to hang out that we play is this little club on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina called Howard’s Pub.  It’s a tiny little island.  About 500 people live there, and it’s mostly locals that come to the show.  It’s just a big party.  We’ve been playing there since ’98.

Tell me about the EP.

I was driving and I heard an ad for the “Colgate Country Showdown” and they said the national winner would get $100,000.  There were 6 radio stations in Georgia that were doing local contests.  If you win local, you go to state – if you win at state, you go to regional – win at regional, go to national.  There were 22 people who competed in Griffin, GA and I won at Griffin. Part of what I won was some recording time at a studio there.  We used that time to record “Story to Green”.

Is your ultimate goal to be signed to a major label?

My ultimate goal is to be able to make a living playing music and feed my family.

Feed them steak or feed them bologna?

Somewhere in between would be nice.  We’ve done bologna for a long time. I definitely don’t have regrets or complaints. Obviously, I wish were further up the chain that we have been at this point, but we’ve been really successful in building a following and getting to play a lot of places.  We keep putting out records and keeping our heads above water and keep playing away, and I’m hoping that’s what it takes.

Do you have plans for a full length recording soon?

We’re always writing.  But as far as when a new full length album will come out, I’m not sure. We released Bittersweet Voyage and then we kind of rushed into doing Shadows. After Sean left we decided we needed to do an album that was representative of the new 3-piece acoustic sound – Bittersweet Voyage was a real guitar heavy record, and we no longer had an electric guitar in the band.  Now we’re kind of gravitating back and doing some stuff with electric guitar.  We’ve go some stuff in the works now. Anybody who does this for long will tell you that everybody’s always got something in the works, somebody’s always making you a promise, and there’s always somebody that’s gonna make you famous.  You always hope they will, and you keep plugging away in case they don’t.