Adam Voith reads from "Recommended If You Like" - a punk rock novel memoir

A new novel about the strange, funny, largely forgotten world where ’90s indie rock and Christian music collided, written by someone who was actually there. Adam Voith comes to Norfolk for a rare local reading from his new novel, Recommended If You Like. Before spending 25 years in the music business representing artists including Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, The Mountain Goats, Father John Misty, HAIM and Songs: Ohia, Voith came up in the underground Christian music scene that inspired the book. Recommended If You Like is a funny, painfully recognizable look back at a strange underground culture that existed somewhere between church camp and the record store, where kids were simultaneously discovering genuinely life-changing music and negotiating an entire parallel universe of Christian bookstores, youth pastors, suspicious parents, scene politics, photocopied zines, touring bands, and the dreaded question of whether your favorite band was actually a Christian band. Told through cassette-recorded monologues beginning in 1995, the novel follows an aspiring music snob trying to navigate punk and indie culture while saddled with the “Christian band” stigma. It is a world Voith knows firsthand, and one that has largely been left out of the usual histories of ’90s underground music. The book has earned enthusiastic praise from Josh “Father John Misty” Tillman, Justin “Bon Iver” Vernon, John Darnielle, Damien Jurado and Kevin Morby. Morby may have provided the most efficient description possible: “Please Kill Me from inside a confessional. Get in the Van after being baptized.” For Hampton Roads in particular, the book may feel uncannily familiar. A surprising number of us lived somewhere inside this culture. Christian kids and ex-Christian kids, evangelicals and ex-evangelicals, punk kids, indie-rock obsessives, musicians, zine people and record-store lifers all crossed paths in a scene that could be genuinely exciting, deeply weird, and occasionally impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. Also joining Adam for an especially rare appearance is Alicia Luma, who performed as a vocalist with Velour 100. Velour 100 occupied one of the coolest and strangest corners of the ’90s Christian indie universe, making dreamy, adventurous music with as much connection to shoegaze and the 4AD world as to anything conventionally considered Christian rock. Alicia will be doing a reading of her own and debuting a new zine. Adam will read from Recommended If You Like, followed by conversation about the novel and the bizarre little musical and cultural ecosystem that produced it. If you spent the ’90s trying to convince someone that the band you liked wasn’t really “Christian rock,” despite all available evidence, you should probably come. Friday, October 16 7:00 PM Wands Books 2501 Fawn St. #10 Norfolk, VA 23504 Free “$0.00” / pay what you want copies of Recommended If You Like will be available