“Love Song No. 7”
from the album Some Loud Thunder
2007
MP3 – “Love Song No. 7” [right-click/save-as]
He who travels fastest, travels alone. The old adage isn’t lost on Alec Ounsworth, the unassuming frontman of oddly dubbed indie-scene sensation Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Even when he’s walking among his more extroverted bandmates, there’s a sense of remova — a cool detachment, as if he’s mentally and emotionally on a different plane altogether. The solitary life? “I prefer it, and it’s just always been that way for me,” Ounsworth bluntly assesses, once he’s finally alone in his dressing room. “I’ve always gravitated toward individual people rather than groups of people, and I think you have to keep a certain distance. You don’t have to be everybody’s friend. It’s just… just unnecessary.” As Ounsworth strolled through a busy backstage at a recent CYHSY gig, and then back and forth to the tour bus, the other group members seemed to instinctively respect his aloof demeanor and give him a wide berth. And with his caterpillar-thick eyebrows furrowed in furtively deep thought, the 28-year-old projects a standoffish seriousness that keeps most interlopers at bay. The group was there to play a concert and preview tracks from its upcoming sophomore album, Some Loud Thunder (due in January), and to its main songwriter, it was a studious, no-nonsense affair. The fewer distractions, the better.
Naturally, Oundsworth’s idea of heaven is the lone-wolf existence he leads in his native Philadelphia, while the rest of his outfit stays sequestered in Brooklyn. Until recently, he owned two springer spaniels, and he regularly took them for six-mile hikes in the city’s sprawling Valley Green park. “That’s the way a lot of this album shaped up in my head,” he explains. “I would take long walks with my dogs and listen to everything I’d recorded through headphones, and it helped with figuring out structuring the album and piecing together what should be where. And it also sparked certain ideas subconsciously. Although I never sat down to write a song with anybody in particular in mind.”
Chilly urban environs or woodsy warmth — it doesn’t matter. Ounsworth has just always liked to walk, with only his animals and a Discman — not an iPod — for company. It’s how he discovered the subliminal sonic beauty of recent CD purchases like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk — just shambling across his hometown with headphones on. “And I learned pretty fast that I’d have to stay aware. I wouldn’t be paying attention to where I was walking, and I ran into things or sometimes I’d veer off the trail. With Tusk, I nearly sprained my ankle several times. But it was worth it.”
Ounsworth and his fiancée will soon be moving into even more verdant digs, on the outskirts of town. They’re planning on getting another springer; Ounsworth is planning on exploring even more rustic roads less taken. “Because in the woods, if I run into anything, nobody gets to see it — only me,” he chortles. “And I’ve gotta say, there are certain albums by, for example, Brian Eno that you can listen to a thousand times and it’s always the same. But when you pick out new things, it’s always exciting. And for me, most of those moments are out in the woods, on the same little trek. That’s one of the things that I most enjoy about not touring.”
If you understand how much this artist treasures his solitude, you’re halfway to figuring out the quirky, curiously addictive sound of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which feels like old Appalachian murder ballads simultaneously filtered through a folkish Neil Young sensibility and the twisted avant-punk-pop mindset of early Talking Heads. Ounsworth used to work in carpentry — an equally lonesome pursuit. All through the work day, he was composing songs in his head, jotting them down on notepads or humming them into his handy microcassette recorder. At quitting time, he’d (of course) walk home through the woods and work on the music until two or three in the morning, and then he’d hit the hay and start the process all over again when the alarm rang a few hours later. He’s been obsessively composing for over 12 years, he reckons, and to date he’s penned hundreds of numbers — enough for two more CYHSY discs and three records apiece by two other separate projects he’s planning. “I happen to be with this group of people now,” he explains. “But I might happen to be with another group of people later, or I might happen to be doing things by myself. And my approach is the same every time. I know my heroes made their professions as songwriters long before anybody started noticing, like Lou Reed or Arthur Lee. You’re not doing it for anybody but yourself. And I never even considered wanting to have a band, initially — this is just kind of on a whim.”
As proven on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled 2005 DIY debut (which sold 50,000 copies by word-of-mouth alone), there’s something magical about this group of people. And they’re as together a unit as their leader is separate. They hang together backstage and on the bus, liberally quoting lines from Anchorman and playing pranks on each other with Jackass intensity and frequency. At every venue, bearded drummer Sean Greenhalgh (who until recently fronted Guns N’ Roses cover combo Mr. Brownstone) gets a birthday cake, whether he wants one or not, thanks to bratty Tyler Sargent and his twin brother, guitarist/keyboardist Lee, demanding said delicacy on their tour rider. Tech-savvy keyboardist Robbie Guertin kids around with his chums but keeps on his computer, overseeing the band’s website, cover artwork — even their kooky tour laminates (which feature a beefy line-drawn T. Rex) and backstage passes (adorned with the faux-gangsta catchphrase “Boo Yeah!”). In fact, the only time these unruly rowdies seem to quiet down is when Ounsworth steps solemnly into sight, as if they can’t be caught shooting spitwads when the professor suddenly pops back into the classroom.
At the moment, however, Ounsworth is nowhere in sight as the rest of Clap starts cutting up on the bus. Manager Nick Stern — a former Atlantic Records publicist — drops in to check on his protégés. And it’s precisely Stern’s familiarity with how the music business works that’s allowed the group to self-release its records and cut itself in on the lion’s share of the profits, according to bassist Tyler, whose melodic Joy Division-ish lines buttress almost every Clap track. “Nick just knows how to get things done, and that’s all you need — one guy who knows the ropes. That and a good online buzz. Because there are so many new avenues opening up these days, like with the Arctic Monkeys where — if you have good songs and the right relationships — you can just totall
y bypass this whole label system. Which is just great for independent music. And even what passes for an ‘indie’ label these days will take 80 percent of your earnings, and this way, we get 80 percent, or at least a larger chunk of it. And it just makes more sense.”
Relying on licensing agreements for worldwide distribution, CYHSY is hawked by ADA in the States and a tiny four-man operation called Wichita in Britain. “But now it’s pretty hard to still say that we’re a ‘DIY thing,’ because we do have people around us, doing things for us,” Greenhalgh confesses. “But why isn’t this the norm? I think that band O.A.R. has a similar distribution deal. And economically, it’s so much more simple.”
Clap’s breakthrough debut cost only a few thousand to finish. The new Dave Fridmann-produced Some Loud Thunder, Tyler sighs, “was significantly more. And as far as Alec’s new lyrics go, we’re hearing a lot of them for the first time ourselves, so we’re actually getting to interpret them here on tour.” What do they mean, these bracing Ounsworth originals? Greenhalgh shakes his head, stumped. “I prod Alec a lot, trying to get stuff out of him. But he uses misdirection a good deal of the time — he’ll constantly say different stuff about different things.”
This remains clear: Thunder is a stylistic stunner, welding Sargent’s trademark bass to ponderous keyboards (a Juno-60 and DX-7 are the weapons of choice), chirrupy mono-poly synths and Ounsworth’s decidedly David Byrne-reminiscent warbling. “Underwater” jangles like prime Roger McGuinn. “Foreign Land” relies on a quavering, almost staccato melody, Ounsworth moaning like a banshee on his guitar. “Safe and Sound” pulses with redolent piano chords until it wafts into an almost lullabye stratosphere; “Come Along” is a purposeful processional that tolls with cathedral bells, and “Satan Said Dance” blips and bleeps with so many noises, you feel like you’ve just wandered into an Atari arcade. Fridmann was having trouble nailing the crashing-anvil “Said dance!” chorus, until he hit on a novel plan. “He brought his wife and eight-year-old kid into the studio,” recalls Lee, “and the kid literally did it for a cookie. It was past four o’clock, so he wasn’t allowed to have snacks, so Dave’s like ‘I got a cookie for ya if you get in that studio and do this!’ Then he multi-tracked it into the huge shout you hear on the record.”
So what does it all mean? Don’t ask Ounsworth. Quiz him on the possible political underpinnings of “Yankee Go Home,” and he immediately gets cagey. “You can understand anything to be political, in a governmental sense or not,” he waffles. “So to me, every song is vaguely political, if you rationalize it that way. But ‘Yankee’ has more to do with an experience I had in the South, and also a general sense of alienation.” He stares for a couple minutes at the Bob Dylan lyric he’s magic-markered onto the inside of his left wrist, “They’re selling postcards of the hanging” (every night he inks a new thought that reflects how he’s feeling). Scratch that, he decides. “It had nothing really to do directly with being in the South. But you get it anywhere from certain people, that sense of alienation. So I’m certainly not saying that I feel unwelcome when I go to the South.” And there’s that spooky sense again that Ounsworth — even when he’s moving through a crowd of people — is a man apart, in and of the moment, but not really. Left to his own tour-bus devices, he enjoys losing himself in a good book; He’s currently plowing through the poetry of T.S Eliot, William Blake and Delmore Schwartz, with some Kurt Vonnegut thrown in for fun. His business-short hair was just trimmed (seems the Clap kids know a swell stylist in town), and — apart from his intense, hooded gaze — he projects an amiable Everyman look that lets him move through the masses virtually unnoticed. “I walk around during our shows and nobody knows who I am,” he marvels. “I gotta make sure security knows me so I can get my laminate to get back in, like ‘I swear I’m in the last band tonight — I’m playing!’ I remember crawling up to the stage through the crowd, and people not letting me pass when we were about to go on. They’d say ‘Hey, buddy — I’ve been standing in this spot for a while!’ And I’m like ‘I understand, but I kinda gotta get through — I’ve gotta get up there on stage!'”
The vocalist (who frequently straps on a harmonica in concert while he twists his leg in place, keeping time with the Sargent/Greenhalgh juggernaut) may be misunderstood by many. But the one person who counts — beyond his bandmates — truly gets him: his missus. “And that’s one of things that’s hurt any other relationship I’ve had up to this point,” he cedes. “A lot of people just don’t understand me. I work on music when I’m at home, and I do it for eight or nine hours a day. And they’ve gotta get that. This is my obsession.” Along with a couple of other pet pursuits, adds the man who studied medical anthropology in college, where he met the other Clap chaps.
“I’m a passive collector of old maps, and I can stand in a map store for hours,” he says. “And I also try to go to every zoo in every place we visit. Zoos and aquariums I find pretty fascinating — that’s a perfect way to spend your day in any big city, I think.” His fave? “The Amsterdam zoo, I think — it seemed as though the animals were all primed for performance every time I went there. But it also has more direct meaning for me because that was the first experience that I had hanging out with my future wife. … She was studying over there at the time, and I just rang her up and said, ‘I’m going to the zoo. Wanna come along?'”
But while zoos may be a nice place to visit, it’s music that Ounsworth lives and breathes, as an anecdote from his recent stopover in Seattle illustrates. “It was about an hour-and-a-half walk from the venue to our hotel, and I would walk back and forth, back and forth,” he says. “And one of the days, my CD player didn’t work.
“So I was walking back, and I was thinking about this album and certain experiments that I’ve done with rearranging songs in a Dixieland style. And I figured a way to rearrange this entire album, each one of the songs — each one just came to me while I was walking. It was very much an epiphany, and it was pretty exciting. So I think I might tinker around with this record when I get home and try to do it the way I had it in my head at that time — with a degree of Tom Waits thrown in there, an old Dixieland style and a little bit of Birthday Party/Nick Cave all blurred in at the same time.” And at last, Ounsworth’s perpetually grave countenance lightens into a nearly childish glee. “I mean, I’ve rearranged all these songs already, rearranged ’em a lot before bringing ’em to Fridmann’s studio. But now I know a new way!”
Traveling alone? Maybe it has its own life-affirming rewards after all.