Sometimes we simply feel forgotten. As if everyone else in the world has figured it out except for us. We’ve all experienced those times where we see people around us fitting in, connecting, joking with each other – but we are somehow not included. We feel isolated and rejected, wondering what is wrong with us. While those experiences can be few and fleeting or many and pervasive, they are usually painful and stay with us throughout our lives. We feel as though who we are as a person is not valued or not worthy of others’ attention or affection. And we may despair at never being able to just be ourselves and still connect with others.
Consequently, we have a dilemma. Do we try to change the person we are to fit in? Or do we stay true to ourselves and seek to connect with our people – people who value and love us as we are?
Adam Weiner, founding member, musician and songwriter for the band Low Cut Connie, has made it his personal and artistic mission to let us know that we have not been forgotten. That the best way to connect with others is not by changing who we are but by embracing who we are. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Adam and Low Cut Connie have been live streaming Tough Cookies, a show that focuses in part on the struggles that so many people have had during this past year – feeling disconnected, isolated and forgotten. As part of their show, Low Cut Connie performed several cover songs that will be included in their new album Tough Cookies: The Best of the Quarantine Broadcasts. And during our conversation on The Hardcore Humanism Podcast, Adam talks about whom he connects with and how he makes that connection while staying true to himself.
Since his childhood and throughout his artistic career, Adam has been fascinated with people who he feels are marginalized. “My eye sort of gravitates towards the people on the margins … I’m always just fascinated with how they live. And as I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve just noticed more that, especially in the music business, there’s less and less writing and entertainment for people on the margins,” Adam told me. “Music tends to be, you know, geared towards youth, tends to be geared to people that are cool or want to feel cool. It tends to be glorifying celebrity culture, and wealth. It’s just an extension of like corporate America in so many ways. And so over the years I’ve just sort of more and more delved into writing and performing for people who I guess you could say, are forgotten, ignored, invisible, on the margins.”
Adam himself felt somewhat marginalized growing up. And while many people might lament being on the fringe and seek to change who they are to fit in, Adam sought to stay true to himself and find others who he thought would accept him as he was. “I was never cool. I also never aspired to be cool … I always had this kind of deep feeling and sympathy for people that were in with the “out” crowd, as they say. And when I would go into a classroom and all the kids would be sort of together and cliquing together and there would be that one lonely, quiet, weird kid in the corner – boy or girl or whatever – I would say that’s going to be my friend. That’s going to be the person I talked to. I think, in my adult life, that hasn’t changed really,” Adam recalled. “And even though part of my job is being a party starter and being sort of the host of a big community. My motivation is still always to try and go out there to people who are forgotten, ignored, or sort of living outside the mainstream and put my arms around them in some way.”
As an aspiring musician, Adam took comfort in the fact that many of his favorite artists were also people on the fringe. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the greatest artists, musical artists, performers – I’m talking about Prince, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Elvis – a lot of these were really introverted kids who were not popular when they were young, who were fairly awkward or ostracized…” Adam said. “They flowered really late and they sort of became their true selves later.”
Adam’s goal was always to be a full time musician. But for several years, in order to pursue his dream, he needed to work as a teacher. He felt that in order to make that work, he had to at times hide his authentic self – what he refers to as wearing a “mask.” “I always had to put on a couple different masks throughout the day, if you know what I mean. Now that I can be me all the time, it feels good,” Adam said. “But I also have a sympathy for people that can’t be themselves all the time. That’s sort of where the Private Lives concept came from, from my most recent album…a lot of people that can’t live comfortably in their skin all the time. And they have to have public and private lives. They have to have, you know, who they are with their family, on the street, their work. And I have been fortunate that I can be myself for a living. But I don’t take it for granted.”
By not needing to wear different masks for the different areas of his life, Adam can dedicate himself to challenging any and all expectations society has put upon him so that he can express himself authentically as an artist. “When you take away layers, when you take away the expectations about how you’re supposed to behave in polite society in terms of gender, humor, respectability, age, race, all these things…,” he described. “I get to take away those layers, all those ideas about how you’re supposed to be. I get to shed them and actually be a more true full version of myself on stage, on camera, in the recording studio, talking to people like I am with you. And so that took time, by the way, because it’s a difficult thing to do. But the fact that I can sort of be running around in my underwear, screaming my head off, hugging people for a living in front of everyone I know. It’s no secret. It took a long time to get to that place.”
Interestingly, one of the ways that Adam discovered his identity as a musician and performer was to find situations in which he was once again marginalized. “I decided that I needed to perform for hostile audiences. It was like a penance but also to learn. Like you have to bomb 50 times before you hit once, right? And that’s true for a comedian or a singer or a dancer…Over and over and over between my day jobs, I would go and tour Europe, Canada, across the USA, and perform in the sh*ttiest, dingiest, craziest places anywhere that would have me – a potluck dinner, an anarchist’s house, a gay bar, you know, in old age home. I just wanted to be eyeball to eyeball with a crowd and see if I could connect and make them feel what I wanted them to feel. And it took years – all through my 20s of half the time bombing and half the time connecting until around age 30 … I had been in the oven long enough, ready with the confidence to get on stage and get on a microphone to just own the place and take any crowd wherever I wanted them to go.”
Adam sees the tension between society embracing and suppressing people as an ongoing conflict that will never fully be resolved. “I think there’s always going to be that tension in terms of, we’re always simultaneously getting more liberated and more uptight. And that’s not just America, by the way. Like we have distinct issues with that tension. And they’re bubbling over right now. But that’s been true throughout humankind, things progress and things regress. Things are opening and closing at the same time…,” Adam said. “And there are just certain things that will always be true.
“And that conflict will I think always be part of our existence.”
