// ADEMA NET //

// MTV //

With one of the most highly anticipated hard rock debuts of the year, Adema had the chips stacked against them from the get go. Even before the bidding war for the latest Bakersfield, California export began, the buzz was deafening.

The arid, blue-collar town more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles has spawned its share of success stories in Orgy and Korn. But without an album, or even a string of shows to prove their mettle, many considered Adema's chances a crapshoot. The open secret that Marky Chavez's half-brother is Korn's Jonathan Davis shifted the focus further away from their music.

But Chavez and company weren't looking for a free ride. If they were going to make it, it had to be on their own terms.

And since May, Adema — Chavez, Dave DeRoo (bass), Mike Ransom (guitar), Tim Fluckey (guitar), and Kris Kohls (drums) — have been showing fans that they're not poster boys for nepotism. A string of blistering live shows and the melodic crunch of their single, "Giving In," have helped spread the word. On the eve of dropping their debut, Adema took a couch trip with Joe D'Angelo and opened up about their new album, the pressures of the last year, and why they won't ever be "giving in" to destructive forces again.

MTV: The album's first single, "Giving In," sounds like it's about battling personal demons. Was writing it therapeutic at all?
Marky Chavez: I was going through a lot of changes in my life during that period. I didn't know up from down, and that song was a way for me to talk about it and get through all of it. I'm better today, and I just feel good that I'm alive, because I was doing some pretty crazy stuff.

The hook of the song [is] about giving up and letting what's going on around you eat you up and screw your life up. ... Performing the song helped me by just being able to talk about it and let other people know that that's the wrong way to go. I was drinking heavily, to the point of passing out, and doing a lot of drugs. That's a recipe for destruction.

MTV: Your case was pretty extreme, but it doesn't sound like you have to have a substance abuse problem to relate to the song.

Chavez: Yeah, you can take that track and relate it to other things. It wasn't just about my own personal experience. All of us were going through different stuff during that time, but you can have an experience in your life and relate it to the song ...

Kris Kohls: Exactly, it's not necessarily drugs or alcohol or this or that. It's mainly your personal thing, whatever you're fighting with.

Dave DeRoo: We can all identify with the song, and that's why we all feel confident with the lyrics. [Marky] writes about things that I think. We can all feel it and dig it.

MTV: For a relatively boring place, Bakersfield has produced a lot of bands recently. Is there something in the water?

Chavez: There's really nothing to do there. ... Once you got into high school you were either throwing the football or you were a loser; there was really nothing in between.

DeRoo: There's no music scene. We started bands because there was nothing else to do except go to keg parties. You'd go out to the dirt fields and get a keg on the weekend. There are only a few pretty girls there, too.

Tim Fluckey: I'm the only one in the band that's not originally from there, and from an outsider's point of view I can tell you it looks like a nuclear bomb was dropped on that place. It's the ugliest place in the world.

Kohls: I love it. We all grew up there. That's our town. ... When I was in high school, I wasn't into sports, so I would stay at home and write songs. So [Bakersfield] made us who we are.

MTV: Your older half brother is Jonathan Davis from Korn. In addition to the pressure of coming from Bakersfield, does that family tie add any more?

Chavez: The only pressure that we all felt was just to write a good record and I feel that we've done that. There are a lot of critics that say this or that. It's like, come to [our] show, if you like it, cool, if you don't, don't listen to it.

DeRoo: I don't even like the term "pressure," because any we have is self-imposed. We put pressure on ourselves because we want to make the best music we can. There hasn't been a lot of good music coming out in the last couple years. We just write songs that we would want to hear. It's that simple.

MTV: What kind of advice did your brother give you when you first started out?

Chavez: [To] watch my back. Read everything I sign, those kind of things. You have to go on your own path and learn it for yourself. Once you see a little bit of it, you can talk about it. But we're just getting started, so there's a lot more chapters I need to go through.

MTV: Do you feel like you need to shake that comparison?

Chavez: Not at all. That will just happen naturally. Like I [said]: Go to the shows, check it out. That's my answer to all that. People use that connection to have topics to talk about, but eventually this record's gonna drop and there's gonna be other topics to talk about. I'm used to getting that at this point in my career, but that will go away.

MTV: You guys have been pegged as being a nü-metal band. Does that bother you? What separates Adema from the rest of the pack?

Chavez: We have songs. I sing, for the most part. I'm not really screaming too much. It's hooky stuff. As far as reinventing the wheel, no. ... We're songwriters and we play ... melodic rock. We listen to stuff from the Cure to Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers ...

Mike Ransom: None of us are trying to "be" a style. That's what a lot of bands try to do. They try to be like this new style, [while] we're just kind of writing each song as it comes along.

DeRoo: We've got five strong songwriters in this band, and it wasn't a conscious effort to write an album full of radio hits. It's not like we wrote with radio in mind. It's just that we've all been through the wringer with so many bands with no melody and no tone. [We just wanted] to make some music.