A.M. Rodriguez is a singer-songwriter currently based in rural Georgia, USA, where he farms with his wife. He plays a mix of folk, country, and Piedmont-blues and is known for intense live performances, poetic and lyrical story-songs, and a right hand deft at alternate thumb fingerpicking. On his recent song “Death in the Country,” Rodriguez spins a rollicking statement of purpose, comparing his time as a city rat to his current existence as a country mouse. His gritty, straightforward delivery calls to mind Social Distortion — but the depth is all his own.
In addition to his singing and songwriting, Rodriguez is also a small-scale organic farmer. Rodriguez opined to Adobe & Teardrops about the perfect song and what we need for a more just music industry — and the planet.
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
This question is interesting because when I was younger I’d have likely opined that a perfect song didn’t exist. The older I get I’ve realized that not only do perfect songs exist, but there are many of them.As far as for the kind of music I gravitate toward listening to and performing (grounded lyrics; story songs; rounded characters), I think John Prine’s song “Paradise” is perfect. That’s one I’d heard at various times in my life, far before I actually found John Prine as an artist. It actually kind of blew my mind a bit when I found out that it was more or less a contemporary composition and not some old mountain tune.
This one’s perfect in the sense that each verse forms a complete vignette, and the chorus expounds upon each verse individually, as well as within the context of the complete story of the song, as the vignettes also add up to more than the sum of their parts, storywise.
The song makes a powerful statement through effective use of humanizing details, which is what the best stories do. It is moving on a personal level, and illuminating on a level of social critique.
Summer of 2020 was yet another period of intense racial reckoning in the States, with many promises in the music industry to make things more equitable. Have you seen any changes so far?
No, but to be completely honest I have no idea what the state of things in the music industry is, currently, so it’s a little hard to see exactly if there will be much difference from how things were before, in regards to race.
The pandemic was a massive equalizer in some regards, as it just wiped out a lot of the bottom class of society economically on so many levels—musician’s day jobs; venues; concert workers, etc. Obviously race and ethnicity tie into that because of how disproportionality so-called minorities make up the lower strata of the American socio-economic spectrum, but as it stands, 2020 was an apocalypse of sorts for the music industry. I appreciate that some folks are looking to make a more artist-beneficial future going forward, and I really hope the efforts pan out in the long run, though I think much of that will be inextricably intertwined with the current pushback against what some call “late stage capitalism” (potentially over-optimistic wording, in my view) and whether or not things can become more equitable as a society.
What is your vision for a more just music industry?
I don’t think the struggle for a more just music industry can be separated from the current broader class, race, religio-ethnic, and inter-generational struggles that we currently face as a country, but also broadly, as a species.
That said, I think a focus on sustainable ecology in all aspects of life going forward will be vital to this goal of a more just set of global societies. As a small/mid-scale organic farmer I have a better-than-average understanding of the difficulties inherent in growing food in a sustainable manner. To be frank, I’m quite worried for the future as climate change will make every facet of life more difficult (as we’ve already seen with the increasingly intense fire seasons, hurricane seasons, tornado seasons, etc.) and food security will be very subject to this range of phenomena. Hyper-capitalism’s immorally corporate focus on the bottom-line since the end of the second world war, and the attendant social conditioning that’s led us to not just accept but religiously defend predatory capitalism, has really led us to a place where sustainability will be vital going forward.
As we’ve seen, the lower classes of society world-wide (classes which are, again, disproportionately comprised of culturally-relative ‘minorities’) are the first to be punished by the deleterious effects of climate change. Artists are broadly in the lower-earning rungs of society (though of course elite-progeny also compromise a portion of the more coveted positions of influence and stature in the art/music worlds—a whole other socio-economic sack of worms…) and will of course bear a good portion of the pain due to occur at the societal level.
All this to say, a more just music industry can only arise in a more just world, and how we get there is complicated, to say the least. I’d say that getting people to focus on sustainability in practice and not as a buzzword (how fucked is that—the concept of sustainment as a species has been reduced to marketing-hype for a non-negligible portion of the population?) is vital.
Where are some places you’ve found joy within the country/Americana world?
I really love chromatic scales and passing tones and the liberal application of them in country/Americana instrumentals pleases me.
Also, song swaps with other singer-songwriters.
What is the best show you’ve ever played?
My favorite show I played was an alt-country/singer-songwriter and metal show we scheduled one time at The Jinx in Savannah, Georgia. It was Alabama songwriter Abe Partridge, this crusty metal band CRUD from Florida, myself, and Savannah favorites Black Tusk, and it was just such a weird mix of people (we staggered the line-up so people would stick around) and folks saw bands/performers they might not normally have, and everyone had a blast. Just a killer show in every regard.
A.M. Rodriguez — Bandcamp, Spotify