You may immediately recognize the man behind the misleadingly named The Goldberg Sisters as Mike Newhouse from Dazed and Confused (or any number of other major roles that would soon follow in the ’90s, from Friends to Saving Private Ryan), but Adam Goldberg has simultaneously been constructing his own musical world over the years. Most recently, his fifth album When the Ships of My Dreams Return not only served as a deeply personal statement, but also saw Goldberg record and mix the project on his own for the first time, in addition to playing all the instruments.
With the album dropping in the dead of winter, the “Neighborhoods” performance he shot for us in Hudson Valley is a bit of a tough watch. Set up in his backyard by a small fire and surrounded by piles of snow, Goldberg can be seen trying to warm his hands between performing two album cuts that extend to over five minutes due to all the looping required to play the songs solo. He begins with the album opener “The Spirit of ’76,” which chronicles Goldberg’s visit to his mom’s temporary living space (“a guest house by a liquor store on La Cienega Boulevard”) in the titular year immediately after his parents’ divorce, while the LP’s penultimate track “Everybody Is Dying” closes the set as a eulogy to a friend he lost in “wretched 2025.”
Naturally, filming a set about such tough subject matter in brutal temps was fraught with additional difficulty. “My pal Daniel was gonna shoot A camera, but after a couple of takes of ‘’76’ his wife showed up with their daughter who may or may not have swallowed some small magnets,” he explains. “So we started over with my 11-year-old Bud on A camera. The idea was to have 3 cameras—Daniel’s, my iPhone, and a third monitored by Bud on sticks upstairs, but in the end we just had the two cameras, different takes, and Ring footage.”
Referring to the subject matter of the first song performed, he adds: “Coincidentally, mom was visiting this week and watching the performance and her grandson film it. Fitting.”
Check out the performance below.
