Review Fix chats with Adobe Collective’s Tim Chinnock, who discusses his origin in music, as well as the band’s new single, “Blind,†as well as their goals for 2020.
Review Fix: How did you get involved in music?
Tim Chinnock: When I was 4 or 5 my dad was listening to a record of Pachelbel’s Canon in D and I turned to my mom and asked, “What is making that sound?†We figured out that I was asking about the violin, and before you know it she had me in lessons which is where I learned a lot of my core music knowledge. Later, I taught myself guitar using my dad’s old folk song books and that’s when I learned to sing and play guitar at the same time. Writing songs came early for me — I played my first original song in a band I formed with a couple of friends in Jr. High School. I took almost 15 years off from songwriting while I went through school to eventually become a Navy doctor, but when I was stationed at the 29 Palms Marine base in 2011, I fell onto a burgeoning music scene. I picked up songwriting again and to get the songs out into the world I started The Adobe Collective.
Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?
Chinnock: Songs come to me in little pieces that I put together over time. I have a lot of little guitar ideas recorded into my phone and I have a running list of lyric ideas that usually come to me as I’m driving or running or watching my kids. Usually, I then bring these song ideas to the band and we see how they evolve and what pieces other people add. With this new album, however, there were a few songs that were much more collaborative, even one where we sat down with nothing and built the song from the ground up.
Review Fix: What makes the band different?
Chinnock: What we’ve been doing lately is combining some of the desert psychedelic or cosmic sounds over the top of what is essentially folk music with an indie pop sensibility. Faith and I are really folk singers so there is an interesting tension between the smallness of our voices and the band’s ability to sound huge enough to reach the stars.
Review Fix: What inspires you?
Chinnock: I’m inspired by watching people who believe in what they’re doing. By the openness of the California desert. By the freedom of children.
Review Fix: How was “Blind” written?
Chinnock: I had the beginning of the chorus and the melody for the rest rolling around in my mind for quite some time, but never was quite clear what the song was about. We had completed the other 9 songs on the album and were thinking about what other songs we could add to finish the album, I brought the idea for Blind in for everybody to hear. We sat down and started to hash out what the verse was and everything came together really fast and suddenly the song made sense. We finished the lyrics and the song structure and recorded it right there in one day.
Review Fix: How are your live shows different from your studio work?
Chinnock: With this new album we try to stay somewhat true to the recordings, but the live shows have grown in energy over the last few months. We use a wide dynamic range to keep people wondering what’s next and we more than anything just want to tell an intriguing story.
Review Fix: What inspired your latest single?
Chinnock: Sometimes it seems like there’s always something better just around the corner no matter how good it is right now. It’s like I’m blind to how good this life is. But this time, instead of fighting against that blindness and beating myself up for it, I decided to embrace it and found out I was able to look so much deeper inside myself to connect with the goodness there… and suddenly goodness was showing up all around me.
Review Fix: What are your goals for 2020?
Chinnock: We have a video premiere in early January and plan to release our new album on January 10 and have a great show planned that night at our local live music hotspot, the world-famous Pappy and Harriet’s. Then we are working on a spring tour. We are currently booking ourselves, but really looking to make connections to work with someone to get bigger shows so we can make more of a living doing this thing.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Chinnock: We’ll see!! We’re working on better booking, selling our album and looking ahead to making recordings in the future.
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