After blazing an unremarkable two-year trail as back-up guitar tech and weed procurer for Archers Of Loaf, Conrad Albee plopped into the thriving Americana scene with a self-released CD-R in early 2013. Garnering no little interest from gullible indie labels south of the Mason-Dixon line still looking for ‘the next R.E.M.’ after 30+ years of fruitless effort, Albee’s Born On Interstate 40 actually contained two worthwhile songs, “Between The Mountains & The Moon” and “Down On The Piedmont”. The rest of the disc was a clever mixture, lyrically and musically, of early-period Ryan Adams and late-period Ryan Adams, with some mid-period Ryan Adams thrown in to keep it fresh.
The more kindly music writers called Albee’s craft “somewhat familiar” and “perhaps over-familiar”, while others went with “not gonna lie, really fucking familiar.” But Albee made no bones or apologies about it, almost gleefully admitting to having copped everything he could from a certain Jacksonville, NC singer/songwriter. “At least I didn’t rip-off Bryan Adams!” he would joke onstage at literally every gig he played, which never got old. Not a bit.
An obvious, clickbait-y Kickstarter campaign employing copyrighted Getty Images photos of old sunburst Gibson guitars and down-home, sepia-toned rural scenes cut-and-pasted from other crowdfunded projects (plus a clear bump from the surreptitious and unauthorized use of Archers of Loaf’s mailing list) somehow managed to net Albee nearly $60k. Like bees to honey or, indeed, flies to shit, Albee’s windfall attracted a teeming, greedy array of low-rent Nashville publicists, song pitchers, and publishers who all came for a sniff of the soon-to-be-forgotten singer’s money. Alas, this is an unfortunate, but all-too-common scenario in the music business of modern times. And past times.
Extravagantly praised by Whiskeytowncrier.com’s lone music critic Chris Reed as “sonically uninteresting and highly derivative”, the re-recorded, re-released Born (Again) On Interstate 40 (Kudzu Records) was but one of a remarkable thousands-strong glut of Americana releases that came out in 2014. Unfortunately for Albee, major retail chain See De’ Baby refused to carry it until a plagiarism lawsuit brought by Ryan Adams was settled. Adams dropped the court case in fairly short order when it was revealed that not one Interstate 40 cd had been sold, but defending the case wiped out the last of Albee’s remaining Kickstarter bonanza. The album was never released on vinyl, nor will it.
A scant two years after his record came out, Conrad Albee moved back to Statesboro and, oblivious to the heavy hand of irony, took an assistant manager’s job at his father’s Kinko’s franchise, finally earning money by making copies for a living.
And he still listens to Ryan Adams, you know, despite everything.
Americana Unsung 