The 15-passenger van raced through the early morning sunlit mountainous hills of Pennsylvania at 50-plus miles per hour, wheels airborne, dragging a trailer full of band equipment.

As chaotic as that moment may have been, members of American Dream Machine (ADM) who were on that van remember it fondly as part of a run of shows. ADM, like the entire music world, is eagerly waiting for the day when tours and concerts are again part of everyday life. But that doesn’t mean the Virginia-based band hasn’t been hard at work in the interim.

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ExoticDancer.com spoke with American Dream Machine courtesy of StripJoints.com about their track “Trapped Under You”, a horrible customer service story, and the motivation behind their debut album “Deadhearts.”

ED: Mitch LoBuglio said in your press release “(Deadhearts) changed the way I think about songwriting and storytelling.” Was that the goal with this album? Are you hoping it has the same effect on listeners?
ADM: Yes, for sure. Music is about storytelling, all the best songs are about storytelling so if we can tell a good story and get it across well, that’s exactly what we want to do. That’s how people connect with it. They connect with the stories that they’ve experienced and if we can do that again, that’s exactly what we want to do.

ED: Shawn Adams said in the same press release, “It’s important to me to let people know they are not alone.” How big a motivation was that releasing this album during a pandemic where a lot of people have been forced to be alone?
ADM: Huge. It was unintentional because we wrote it before the pandemic but that’s a huge thing for me anyway. Everybody feels like they’re alone, especially when they’re really depressed, really down on their luck, that’s the one thing that keeps you down: feeling like you’re alone, but we’re not. We’re all connected. So that was something I wanted to hammer home before the pandemic and then that hit and it was like OK perfect, let’s just knock it out of the park.

ED: You were forced to cancel touring plans because of COVID, do you have any tentative plans yet to tour once this is behind us?
ADM: We haven’t gotten down to scheduling any more tours yet just because everything is still so up in the air.

ED: In the perfect world, your phone rings and on the other line you hear ‘We want you to open” Who’s on the other end?
ADM: My Chemical Romance. Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl. I’ll drop everything right now.

ED: Shawn, I read you got a job waiting tables and saved up enough money to record a full 10 songs—where did you work? What’s your worst customer story?
ADM: I worked at, I still work at Bar Louie. Went from serving to bartending, back to serving because we don’t’ have a bar top open anymore. I can’t wait for that to open back up. As for the customer experience, let me scroll through the Rolodex … there are so many. It’s amazing to me the way people just treat you like a non-person sometimes. Even if you walk up to the table, you’re like ‘How’s it going, this is chill, I’m not gonna give you a robotic delivery …’ I’m opening the bar, I’m behind it, I’m stuck there. It’s a big bar, like 60-70 seats all around it. It’s just me and my manager. This dude walks in, he’s like ‘We sit wherever? Can I sit outside?’ Yeah, someone will be right out. Normally, there’s a server, they’ll go see them and then go sit and do their job. About 30 minutes go by, and this dude’s a big biker guy, he comes back in visibly so mad. He looks directly at me and he goes ‘Is this how I’d be treated if I was Black?’ I looked at him because it didn’t even register. I was like ‘Dude, are you serious right now?’ I don’t even know what you’re talking about. He just goes off on this rant, 10 minutes of ‘Fuck you, fuck this place, fuck everything.’ My manager ended up coming up because I’m shell-shocked. My manager taps me on the shoulder and says ‘Just go.’ That was pretty bad.

Music is about storytelling, all the best songs are about storytelling so if we can tell a good story and get it across well, that’s exactly what we want to do. That’s how people connect with it. They connect with the stories that they’ve experienced and if we can do that again, that’s exactly what we want to do. — American Dream Machine

ED: Shawn, you also said “Deadhearts” has an “underlying message of realizing your own self-worth beneath it all.” Why did you think that was so important for people to hear/be aware of?
ADM: That was important for me, honestly. Part of that entire album was getting, it was the first time where I went in and did it all on my own kind of, so it was very cathartic and very personal. There are a lot of things I’ve been working on, “Deadhearts” was like therapy for me and I know that I’m not the only person that feels like that so if I can try to relate it to me or it helps me, I know it’ll at least help one other person.

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ED: StripJoints services DJs at gentlemen’s clubs nationwide, so why would “Trapped Under You” be a good choice to play at a gentlemen’s club?
ADM: Listen to it, man. If you can’t see a smoking hot girl dancing to that song, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what else I got, that’s the best we got right there.

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