Embedded in the air of Joshua Tree, one can find the soothing psychedelic folk sounds of the Adobe Collective. Every song from the group sets a listener in a state of extreme calm, and they create a perfect soundtrack for a lazy day. My favorite tracks include “Carousel” and “Home (Sins)”
The band released its third album, All the Space That There Is, in January, and has been playing various shows around the Coachella Valley, including a February Monday-night residency at The Alibi Palm Springs. I spoke to brainchild of the band, Tim Chinnock, over the phone about music, life and, of course, the name of the band.
“It’s always hard to give something a name, but somebody once told me that you just have to name it,” Chinnock said. “In 2011, my wife, Faith, and I were stationed at the Marine base in Twentynine Palms. When we first moved to the area, the first house we found for rent on Craigslist was this old 1937 original adobe house in Twentynine Palms. It was passed down from this guy’s grandma, and he had lovingly restored the whole thing; as soon as we walked in, we just felt at home. It was in that house that songwriting actually started to make sense to me, and songs just started coming one after another.”
Although songwriting didn’t come to him until later, Chinnock’s family has always been around music.
“I was born in Redlands and grew up most of my life in the Inland Empire,” he said. “My family has always been really musical, but it was always something that they did on the side. My dad and his three brothers were in a band in high school, even though they grew up very religious, and it was kind of against the rules. They all went on to get jobs, but they still did music on the side. I grew up kind of religious and kind of conservative, and when John Lennon said that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, my parents went out and burned all of their rock records. So I was just left with my dad’s classical and folk records. I didn’t really get into rock until junior high.”
The Adobe Collective’s discography includes a lot of serene tones, although the most recent LP turns up jams a little bit more—with a bit of a rock flair.
“The first couple of albums are definitely more what you call Americana,” Chinnock said. “At the core of me, I’m a folk singer and a folk writer. What’s so great about the new album is that as we’ve solidified our band lineup, we’ve been inviting other people to take more of an active role in the creation of the stuff. I’d come up with some structure to the song, but then we’d come together as a band to finish it.
“As for the recording process, we recorded with Chris Unck, who’s in the band, at High Lonesome Studio. With this album, he got a little bit more freedom with the palette. What I’m really excited about for this new album is that we’re exploring a bunch of new and different possibilities. It’s much more of a collaborative approach, and we’ve got a little bit more of a rock feel thanks to Chris. We’re taking people’s influences and building on top of what me and Faith started with our first two albums.”
All the Space That There Is comes four years after the band’s last album.
“We took a little bit of time off, because my son was born, and it was also around the time I quit the military,” Chinnock said. “We took a long time to move out of our house, get settled and make the split from the military, which is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Moving houses and finding a new job took up quite a fair amount of time.
“As for the album, well, it’s actually been in the can for a while. We’ve just been trying to shop it around and get some advertising behind it. Everybody in Joshua Tree knows who we are, but not everybody in Indio knows who we are. It was all super-local in Joshua Tree for the first two albums, so we wanted to bring this new record out to a bigger audience.”
Chinnock said the band has gradually gotten more serious—and that now, after almost a decade, things are truly coming together.
“It’s been a slow burn,” Chinnock said. “When we started, me and my wife were in the military, and it’s hard to get serious about something like that when there’s an overlord in your life. Both of our first two albums coincided with the birth of our kids. Now we’re at a place where our kids are old enough so we can start to get some distance from them—but we’re also getting so much richness from them that we put into our music. It’s a really good time right now, because we can take trips away for weekends if we need to play shows and whatnot.”
For more information, visit www.theadobecollective.com.