Adam Weiner, frontman of rock-and-roll band Low Cut Connie, is often commended for his vibrant stage presence. Weiner is playing in Forest Park next weekend at Evolution Festival where you can be a part of the “beautiful sexy salad bowl” he calls his audience (photo courtesy of Bob Sweeney).

“I don’t want to go out there and die, you know, I want to kill,” Low Cut Connie frontman Adam Weiner tells me. 

You’ve probably never heard of Low Cut Connie. But Weiner delivers a killer performance every time he and his band come out on stage. You’ll probably become a frequent listener shortly after they finish their set.

Low Cut Connie is a rock-and-roll band that experiments with soul, blues, and piano-heavy tracks. The name “Low Cut Connie” is the merging of two separate band name ideas: The Connies and The Low Cut. The band started as “an accident” over the course of a sweltering weekend in a garage in Gainesville, Florida. Weiner and three of his friends spent three days in 105-degree heat creating what would become the band’s first album, “Get Out the Lotion,” in 2011. The group was connected by Weiner, yet none of them had ever met before jamming together that weekend. While the band’s lineup has changed since then, Weiner remains the group’s frontman. 

Weiner is taking our Zoom call from Philadelphia in a room that seems to be his bedroom, evident from the bed he is sitting on. For him, it’s just past noon, and he is getting a head start on his lunch with a banana he eats throughout our conversation.

“Because it was so hot, we didn’t really play anything more than once or twice. … So it gave this sort of quality of not overthinking anything,” he says. “Rio,” one of the band’s most popular tracks, is the second song on their debut album. The band was “born out of fun,” and Weiner tries “to keep it fun,” which is obvious to anyone who has ever seen him perform live. 

Having started the band in his 30s and steadily growing a fan base since then, Weiner says that he approaches music differently than if he had started 10 years earlier. 

“If I can put a song out or do a show and it reaches the people in front of me and the people around me dig it, I’m happy. The moments where my art reaches a lot more people, it’s a nice surprise,” the 40-something-year-old says.

Low Cut Connie has recorded eight studio albums and has gained the support of notable figures like Barack Obama (who featured the band’s track “Boozophilia” in his 2015 summer playlist), Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Zuzana Čaputová (the former president of Slovakia), and a considerable slate of editors at Rolling Stone, just to name a few. Even then, however, the band has never had a “hit” song. I ask him if, or why, he might be scared of having a hit song. 

“I’d like to focus on doing things that people will remember, even if it’s a smaller number of people,” he says. Already past 30, his “priority is to have a long career and just do as much as I can, have as much fun as I can, challenge people and myself as much as I can, [not] chase a hit,” he says before taking a bite of his banana.

Noting the band’s dedicated fanbase that includes many icons, I ask him what it is like to have his work recognized by so many iconic people and if he ever thought his music would make such an impact. His response is short: “I just put one foot in front of the other.”

Before Weiner was the frontman of Low Cut Connie, he was in another band with an equally strange name, Lady Fingers. And if odd band names weren’t enough, he also names his pianos (but what musician doesn’t?). I ask him about the names of his pianos, especially since they’re not exactly traditional. As it turns out, this is exactly how he hopes people will react when they find out the piano he performs with every night is named Nellie (the piano before her was Shondra, named after an elderly stripper).

“My piano Nellie is named after a woman named Nellie Lutcher, who was an amazing jazz and blues piano player in the middle of the 20th century,” he says. “Not a lot of people remember her, but she was really an amazing piano player, so I named her that so that people like you could ask me that question, and I could point them in the direction of her music, and people could rediscover Nellie Lutcher.”

After a quick glance at Low Cut Connie’s body of work, anyone can see how many of their songs are named after women: Tina, Beverly, Suzanne, Charyse, Annie, (I could go on for a bit longer). This is because, as Weiner tells me, “Women’s names are more interesting than men, and women in general are more interesting to me than men.”

Names like these, the occasional overheard conversation of some overly loud person, or a title he comes across in day-to-day life give Weiner the inspiration to craft the stories his songs are about. Within the story, Weiner says there is a dialogue between himself, the characters he sings about, and you, the listener. He adds that he tells his stories “through a mask. Through one layer of fantasy. Not everything that I write about in my songs is happening to me, or has happened to me, but there’s a kernel of myself in every song and my experience in every song.”

Those who see Low Cut Connie live never fail to mention Weiner’s riveting stage presence. Partly innate, partly learned, Weiner used to perform in front of hostile audiences on purpose to learn how to win crowds over. Weiner explains that this includes playing in front of people unfamiliar with his music who “would prefer to not like you.” 

“It grew my stage IQ,” he says. “I like the challenge of performing in front of strangers and trying to convert them.”

Weiner’s strong cultural identity as a Jew also influences the way he approaches and interacts with his audience. He tells me that he’s the “Jewiest person” he knows. Recently, Weiner was even photographed in Rolling Stone wrapping tefillin. 

“It’s made me who I am. It influences how I move through the world, what my perspective is, and for me, it’s a source of empathy for other people,” he says. To Weiner, celebrating diversity is at the foundation of his empathy. He describes his audience as a “beautiful, sexy salad bowl.” 

“Look at all these different people, different ages, backgrounds, skin color, persuasions, orientations, everything, religions. And that’s to me, the beauty of America and our society, and we have to protect diversity,” Weiner says.

A staunch defender of diversity, Weiner is public about his disdain for the Trump administration. Early this year, Low Cut Connie cancelled their show at the Kennedy Center after Trump’s restructuring of the performing arts center’s board, becoming its chair. 

He looks at me through the tiny camera on his computer, me on the other end doing the same, as he tells me in a very serious tone: “Your generation and your classmates are being challenged in ways that previous generations haven’t or haven’t for many years. And I just hope that you guys will stay inspired.” To students at WashU, Weiner says, “Make the future that you want to see. And you can do that in big ways or small ways. You can do it through activism. You can do it through art.” 

While I didn’t foresee our conversation taking a somewhat philosophical turn, Weiner brings up a great point. 

“To me, it’s a noble experiment to try to find out if people from all kinds of diverse backgrounds can live together in a free society. … It’s an experiment that is riddled with tragedy, past and present, but to me, it’s an experiment worth fighting for,” he tells me.

As it quickly became evident to me during our conversation, Weiner is in it for the excitement creating art grants him. Above all, however, it is about sharing his art with people who will enjoy it as much as he did while making it and performing on stage.

“It’s really shocking to me, as much as anyone else, that I’m doing this 15 years later. It’s grown and changed in a million different ways. But I think that you should always make music for fun on some level, you know? You don’t want it to just become an obligation or just do your job,” he says.

With that, he finishes his banana in one last bite and our conversation comes to a close.

Low Cut Connie is on tour for the rest of the year and is performing in St. Louis next weekend where you can be a part of the “beautiful, sexy salad bowl” he calls his audience.

LINER NOTES WITH ADAM WEINER: FOUR FURTHER QUESTIONS

Student Life (SL): Soul music is not a huge part of Jewish upbringing. So who exposed you to the style of music that you make?

Adam Weiner (AW): My parents. My parents love Motown, and they love to dance, and that was a gateway drug to a whole world of soul music, blues, R&B, rock and roll. But it all came through my parents listening to Motown.

SL: St. Louis is a huge historical music city. And I was curious, do you know Blueberry Hill? And if you do, are you planning on visiting when you’re in town?

AW: Not only do I know it, I’ve played there. It’s been some years, but we played at Blueberry Hill, and it was when Chuck [Berry] was still alive, and we missed him by like an hour. I did have the good fortune of seeing Chuck Berry live in Philly many years ago, and he was quite a character, man.

SL: In the past, you worked as a perfume spritzer at a mall, as an English teacher, and as a pianist for drag karaoke bars and ballet classes. What other careers did you have before becoming a career musician?

AW: Piano tuner, SAT tutor. I worked in a vintage clothing store. I helped an antiques dealer. I worked for the 911 Foundation, doing workshops in preschools, I mean, on and on and on. I did phone banking. I had so many jobs. Oh, as a secretary in a doctor’s office. I’m not gonna tell you I was good at any of these jobs, but I did a lot of weird stuff.

SL: Of all of the Jewish musicians, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Lenny Kravitz, you name them, who is your favorite and who’s the one that’s influenced you the most?

AW: Lou Reed, for sure. You know, another sardonic atheist Jew who was extremely Jewy despite being an atheist. I think Lou Reed has been a great influence on me in the way that he wrote songs and the kind of fearlessness that he brought to his music and his words.

Low Cut Connie is set to perform at Evolution Festival in Forest Park on Sept 28.

Low Cut Connie frontman, Adam Weiner, started the band when he was 30 years old: “At that point, if you haven’t had any success, the world starts to tell you to stop trying,” he says (photo courtesy of Cortney Armitage).