Maine's singing, Scottish mailman contemplates a full-time music career

PORTLAND, Maine — Ross Adam is two people at once.

By day, as a gray-and-blue-clad mailman, he has trudged the same Deering neighborhood route on foot for nearly a decade. He stuffs letters through mail slots, scans bar codes, takes care with the occasional aggressive dog and deals with the weekly flood of Saturday fliers that make his satchel extra heavy.

By night, dressed in his trademark tartan trousers, Adam packs pubs and venues all over southern Maine with his brand of high-energy, multi-instrumental folk music. Adoring fans and strangers alike hoist their glasses and sing at full volume, eager to forget their troubles and revel in the tattooed, Scotland native’s relentless charm.

But late night music gigs and early post office mornings aren’t a friendly fit, and maintaining the balance is nearly impossible.

Increasingly, like many artists with day jobs and successful side hustles, Adam feels like he must make the difficult choice between one or the other.

Adam is a responsible father of two children with college expenses. He’s got a mortgage, a wife and a future retirement fund he’s nearly vested in.

At the same time, he recently released a popular new album and secured a music manager who is helping him get better-paying gigs. He’s about to embark on his first international mini-tour of Ireland, using vacation time.

He has the nagging feeling that at age 36, it’s now or never for becoming a full-time musician.

“You only get one life,” Adam said. “It’s so sacred. You’ve got to be able to look back and be happy with what you did with it.”

Growing up in the small Scottish town of Burntisland, Adam didn’t come from a musical family. He discovered music as an eight-year-old while sheltering from a rainstorm on a family camping trip inside a music store.

There, he picked out the melody to “The Skye Boat Song,” a traditional lullaby his mother sang to him, on a piano. His astonished parents soon bought him a small keyboard.

At 11, he and a friend wandered into a free bagpipe lesson. Adam stuck with it, coming back every Wednesday night, learning the pipes and life lessons from older men he recalls as being “big, tough guys.”

The band was called the Burntisland and District Pipe Band, and Adam was soon traveling, marching and competing with it, all around Scotland and England.

“When I joined that pipe band, it changed who I was,” he said. “It was my whole life. It gave me discipline.”

High school rock bands followed but, at the same time, Adam was fascinated by folk musicians who could get a crowd of distracted pub-goers all singing together. He was especially impressed by Alex Killin of the Kingdom Folk Band.

“He could get everyone singing — old people, young people, even the bartender,” Adam said. “I always thought it was a cool superpower.”

Adam was soon emulating his hero, playing solo gigs and doing whatever it took to get a crowd singing. But, as a young adult, grownup realities also started to take over. He earned a social work degree, worked with at-risk youth, married an American woman, moved to South Portland and started a family.

Crossing the ocean, he left his professional musical ambitions behind. Instead of gigging, Adam got a good job at the post office with decent pay, union benefits and a retirement plan.

But a subsequent divorce and what turned into a new marriage changed all that.

Shortly before the pandemic, he went on a blind date that morphed into a bonfire party with friends. There, Adam pulled out his guitar and entertained the gathering the way he would have, in a pub back home.

“I knew I was going to marry him after about the first 10 minutes,” his blind date and now spouse, Shannon Adam, said.

Enamoured and encouraging, she urged Ross Adam to take his talents seriously and booked him for a St. Patrick’s Day show at a pub. The gig was a success, and his music career took off.

At a recent show at RiRa in Portland, it was standing room only with all eyes and ears on Adam as he commanded the room. Using special, sound-looping pedals, he played guitar, fiddle and banjo at the same time while stomping another pedal creating a drum sound — which made the crowd clap along to the beat.

At one point, wearing a wireless headset microphone, Adam left the stage and asked the rowdy crowd to be quiet while he sang them a tender song about whiskey. Almost like magic, the hushed room stayed silent as he walked among the audience like a revival preacher, singing, patting children on the head and laying his hands on shoulders.

Then, as Adam finished the a capella song, he raised his pint and released the audience with a toast. The crowd burst into whoops and applause while he remounted the stage and got the party going again with traditional Scottish and Irish songs, as well as the hip-hop classic “No Diggity.”

A few days later, on a gray, snowy morning, Adam pulled his postal van up to the sidewalk on Stevens Avenue, and he stepped out of the sliding side door. There was no applause as he started his route, mail satchel slung off one shoulder, his steaming breath hanging in the air.

Adam said he genuinely likes his post office job and cherishes the connections he’s forged.

Down one side street, he found Steve Robnett, standing in his driveway. After handing Robnett his mail, the two chatted for a while. Robnett said he knew all about his mailman’s other life.

“We’ve actually had him play two house concerts here,” he said. “We love Ross.”

Further on, at the Rwanda Bean coffee shop, manager Alexa Kelly said Adam has always been more than just a mailman and helped her as she struggled through a messy divorce.

“He was one of my biggest rocks,” Kelly said, “I didn’t have anyone else in my life who knew what I was going through.”

To this, Adam mostly shrugs.

“You leave a trail wherever you go,” he said, “so I try to be good to people.”

But, as his music career blossoms and takes up more time, Adam has a decision to make. A recent bout of pneumonia exacerbated by exhaustion made it even more clear: one job or the other has to give.

Right now, he’s leaning toward full-time music. There isn’t anything which makes him feel more alive or in the moment.

“There’s nothing like it, even in a small pub. It feels incredible when people sing along. It’s almost like they’re part of the band — it’s magic,” Adam said. “I feel like I was made for this.”