Adam Hood
Adam Hood, 28, hails from East-central Alabama, but you’d be out-of-luck trying to pigeon-hole his style geographically. First picking up a guitar at age ten, by fourteen he was playing live in church bands. By sixteen, Hood had dropped off the football team and onto the local scene playing week-end gigs at local restaurants. “I could either make money playing music, or sit on the bench,” he says. After a stint at Auburn University, Hood entered the job-world and tried to back away from music. “I gave it up for three months in ‘97 when I moved to Montgomery (Alabama), and I went crazy. It’s been getting better and more consistent ever since I moved back to Auburn.”
Indeed it has gotten better. Over the past ten years, Hood has become one of the most successful local fixtures in the college town of Auburn, Alabama. During that time, a soulful arsenal of original music crept through his usual covers, inspired by the songwriting spirits of musicians like John Hiatt, Ian Moore, and Steve Earle. In response, his local following has steadily grown.
Playing solo most of his life has led to a guitar-style to complement the lack of accompaniment. “Powerful” is just one of the words to describe the bends, twists, and minutiae that inhabit Hood’s compositions. It’s a curious blend of melodic works complemented by a tormented guitar and a patient, but very powerful, voice.
In June of 2001, Hood released a rough demo of his songs for out-of-town bars and other musicians. The demo ended up circulating rapidly among Auburn students. In December of 2002, Hood released 21 to Enter, his first full-length CD, recorded live in Columbus and Atlanta, Georgia. “It all boiled down to time and budget. The truth is, there’s something about the singer-songwriter live performance that is just American. People are drawn to the honesty of it.”
Hood takes a lot of time figuring out how to make each show as good as possible. Since he quit land surveying with the release of 21 to Enter, music is a full time job; and he gets a lot of practice, playing an average of twenty-five shows a month throughout the South-east. New music is another thing Hood gets a lot of these days. Powerful solo acts like Martin Sexton and Patty Griffin have inspired Hood to access subjects and feelings in his music that can be atypical of his Texas troubadour image. The complexity of his word-craft shows such muse, leading many to see a musician entering the music business for all the right reasons.
