Adam Hood Returning To Foothills Festival

The last time Adam Hood saw Jasper, it was covered in water.Friday, September 11, 2015. The Foothills Festival was just getting cranked up. Unfortunately, so was Mother Nature. Outdoor concerts by Adam Hood and Bonnie Bishop were seconds from being cancelled due to severe winds and hard rain, but quick-thinking saved the day. Both artists were quickly moved indoors for acoustic sets; Bonnie in Warehouse 319, Adam in Los Reyes Grill. Some artists might shudder at the idea of playing here again after that, but Adam takes it all in stride.“Oh man, that was kind of me in my element, to be honest with you,” Adam laughs, speaking from his Northport home. “I’ve spent more years of my life playing inside at places like that, just me and another guy, than I have on big stages. And also, I’ve been doing this long enough to understand that weather is a very important variable.”Today is Adam’s day off. No tour bus, no studio, no writing songs, no waiting backstage to play another show in a new town. Today he’s home with his family.Music has been a part of Adam’s life since he was a boy growing up in Opelika. “I got started playing music in church. My parents bought me a guitar when I was a kid, but I was too young to have the attention span to really retain playing,” he says. “My best friend, who actually lived behind me, got a guitar, and I had mine, and we took lessons from the same guy the summer going into the seventh grade. He took lessons on Monday, I took lessons on Tuesday, and those days we would sit down and teach each other the things that we learned, and we kind of played together all through high school. I was sixteen when I kind of got serious at it. I heard an album called Bring the Family by John Hiatt, and it kind of changed my life.”Two random yet serendipitous encounters, one in 2004 in Little Rock, Arkansas with producer Pete Anderson, the other a few years later in Gruene, Texas with singer Miranda Lambert, opened doors that eventually led him to sign as a writer to Carnival Music Publishing and to the same record label as an artist.Adam’s songs have been recorded by a boatload of artists, including Lee Ann Womack. Some of his songs from his 2011 album The Shape of Things were recorded by Little Big Town, David Nail, Josh Abbott Band, Brian Keane, and John Corbett. “It’s always been my plan, to tell you the truth. I want to have a career as an artist and I enjoy making records but the songwriting process is really what I enjoy the most,” he says.Bonnie Bishop, the artist who played the acoustic set at Warehouse 319 during The Great Foothills Monsoon of 2015, recorded an album titled Ain’t Who I Was. Adam co-penned the title track with Brent Cobb.Around the time Adam’s contract with Carnival was ending, he was approached with an offer by Dave Cobb, the Grammy-winning producer of artists Shooter Jennings and Jason Isbell. “Dave said, ‘What are you doing now?’ and I said, ‘I’m really not doing anything, I’m still writing and playing.’ He said, ‘Well, I just got this thing happening with this Low Country Sound and I want you to be a part of it.’”The arrangement seems to be a good fit. “It’s different because in a lot of scenarios, you don’t really know who you're writing for. You’re kind of just throwing things at the wall to get things recorded,” Adam says.Adam’s fourth album, Welcome To The Big World, was released last November and features eleven tracks, ranging from the roadhouse style rock of Delbert McClinton to the storyteller rock of Kris Kristofferson. One song, He Did, is a tribute to his late father Larry Hood, who passed away in 2010 of colon cancer. Adam says writing that song was therapeutic for him.“That’s a hard thing to do. It would be easier to write something for your mother or your wife, but when it’s a tribute to your father, there’s just a lot at stake there,” he says somberly. “It took me about four years after he was gone to really sit down and write it. It was really organic. It was my last month at Carnival, and the guy I wrote it with and I were just kind of sitting there throwing ideas out there and nothing happened. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea for a dad song called He Did, and I mean, lines just started coming one after another. It was one of those things where the song wrote itself. I don’t wanna pull anybody’s heartstrings, but you know, losing a parent is a tough thing. I have people come up to me all the time and say, ‘Man, that song means so much to me, I lost my dad.’ Cancer is a really hard thing to watch someone you love go through, and so it’s good to get that off my chest and it’s even better that it means something to other people.”When he’s not writing or recording, Adam is usually on the road. One of his earlier tours, with Leon Russell, was both thrilling and eye-opening. “That was really my first real ‘Adam’s getting on the road’....” he says. “I was all by myself and hadn’t seen much of the country, so I just went and took every gig I possibly could, no matter what the pay was. I’ve played Manhattan with him, I’ve played Malibu, you know, all the good places in Texas. I was as broke as I've ever been in my whole life. I really experienced a lot of good stuff and it sort of put my feet on the ground as a touring musician.”Adam was also chosen to play on Willie Nelson’s Country Throwdown Tour in 2011.Being on the road doesn’t sound so bad if you’re a single guy, but if you’re a dad with two daughters, it’s hard being away from your family for days at a time. Adam, who has a seventeen year old daughter, Ashlyn, and a three months old daughter named Drue, says it’s part of the job.“I guess I feel like we’ve got diapers to pay for now,” he jokes. “It also makes it a lot harder, man. I’ve gotten back into the whole ‘I really don’t want to leave’ attitude.”To any aspiring musicians and songwriters seeking advice, Adam says there’s not a clear-cut formula, except learning your craft well and being consistent. “It’s one of those things where there’s no formula to it. Everybody’s career is different,” he says. “However, it’s all kind of fundamental, it’s all based on you creating music. My advice is, if you play an instrument, learn your instrument. If you perform, go out there and perform. The only way to learn how to do this is to get out there and do it, and do it for yourself. And take advice from the people who will give it to you. It’s a really competitive industry but you know, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. The better you are and the more time you spend learning your craft, the better you’ll sleep at night, if nothing else.”Adam Hood will be appearing at the 2016 Foothills Festival on Sept. 9th, even if he has to travel by canoe. 78Adam’s music and tour date info is available at his website, http://www.adamhood.com.