Interview: Clem Snide

Today's Soundtrack: Eef Barzelay - I Love The Unknown

Clem Snide - Moment in the Sun

Eef Barzelay - Well

Today's Soundtrack: I’ve always been interested in how you write songs. Are you one of those people who block out an hour every morning and sit at a typewriter?

Eef Barzelay: I’m definitely not that guy. I don’t really have a routine. I’m not especially disciplined with it. It’s definitely gotten more mysterious over the years. Now, it just comes and I don’t know where it comes from. I try to just trust it. I used to get a little nervous. I was anxious in the past. Some were finished songs -- verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, title -- that never even saw the light of day.

Today's Soundtrack: Has the songwriting process has evolved for you over time?

Eef Barzelay: I didn’t really write my first song until I was 22, 23. The first five (or) ten years spent -- I was just sort of learning how to do it. It’s not like writing an article, or a short story, a novel. It’s not that it takes a lot of time. It’s really simple. It’s deceptively simple. It’s probably why there are so many songwriters. But what makes a song that can live on its own, one that’s more -- I’m not sure this is the word -- valid -- that is kind of mysterious.

TS: Do you think it’s mostly from what you take in? Like the books and music that’s around you?

EB: Everything sort of forms it I guess. For me, the last like five years, it’s really felt more like a channeling thing. Someone will just sort of come into my mind -- a person, a thing -- and tell their story, or relay some conflict. I’m more and more like a vessel.

It’s not some Alanis Morisette kind of s--t. Nothing happens in my life. I don’t have those intense experiences.

TS: So you didn’t have sex and break up with an NHL player?

EB: I dated a few NBA players. That was in the mid-90s. But it was more about the sex.

TS: You’ve come up with this idea for the tour that fans can request three songs for you to play at a show, or for you to record and send to them personally, for a few bucks. How did you come up with that? How has that worked so far?

EB: It’s provided some interesting and fulfilling experiences. I read a few messages from couple of people on the Twitter that were saying, “What a brilliant marketing idea!” I’m like, “Really?”

I just wanted to try out a new way to explore connections with the fans. You’re kind of doing away with the preciousness of the master recording and just let the song exist once for each person.

It hasn’t been especially lucrative. It’s been a lot of work, actually. Something like 60 requests came in all at once a few weeks ago. I have maybe a dozen left. I figured if I did a few a week, it’d be cool.

TS: Have you gotten any especially odd requests? Any odes to dead or dying dogs?

EB: It’s allowed me to revisit some songs, to rediscover these old songs that I haven’t even thought about, sometimes, in years. Some people were doing it as a gift to their husband. There’s definitely a familial aspect or theme to it. I don’t think I’ve had any extreme requests. I haven’t been singing to someone’s dead dog. A lot of people do it for some family member or their girlfriend. I try to mention everybody’s name at least once.

TS: If you could apply this rule to another artist -- you got to pick three songs of theirs to hear sung to you -- who would it be?

EB: I’m psyched that there are people who want me to sing these personalized songs, but I don’t have the desire for that. I wouldn’t want Neil Young to record three songs just for me. Most of the people I listen to are long gone anyway.

Today's Soundtrack: What are you listening to right now?

EB: I don’t really listen to much new music anymore. I like Bill Callahan. I like some of those Jens Lekman records. And I really like “Little Wings,” the Light Green Leaves record. I like that record. I’ve been listening to a lot of early-60s jazz, too. A lot of Hank Mobley.

TS: Have you ventured into free jazz yet? You’re almost to that part of that decade.

EB: I listened to all that crazy s--t when I was in art school. Listening to Ornette Coleman, Lester Young. But I’m into, let’s say, sad jazz now.

TS: Do you have any particularly glaring memories of any times you spent in Boston?

EB: Clem Snide actually started in Boston, so it’s real weird for me to play here. I had a mid-life crisis moment here a few years ago. I was doing this sort of sad solo tour. We played at TT The Bears. And that was where we played our second Clem Snide gig ever. It was at a new band night. We opened for the Gin Blossoms, if you can believe that. There were, like, four people there.

And, seventeen years later, there I was. It was definitely a humbling experience.

TS: (Laughing) I think you’re underestimating the kind of people who come through TTs.

EB: (Laughing) Uh, no, I don’t think so. In twenty years, that place has not changed one bit. Now to play Upstairs at the Middle East -- it’s cool. There’s something nice about it.

When I lived in Boston, I was a miserable, f---ing depressed person. It wasn’t a good time. It’s not a good place to be when you’re lonely and depressed. I do not have particularly good associations with it.

I went to MassArt. I worked at this place in Charlestown making hand papermaking equipment. It was a lost and kind of depressing part of my life.

TS: I was watching this AV Club interview with you (where Eef covers Journey, which you should watch), and one thing I thought was interesting was that you were talking about how great it is to be on the road, and how it was inconceivable to you that someone could hate that.

EB: That was a thing to do back then, with those bands in the ‘80s. They always had that one song, they had that one video in black and white. They were all tired. Like, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” and Bob Seger had a song like that. Jackson Browne, too. Maybe if I was on tour eight months out of the year, I’d get like that. But, for me it’s a vacation.

Saturday: Clem Snide, Heligoats at The Middle East Upstairs. Doors at 8 p.m., 18+, $14.
Sunday: Clem Snide, Heligoats, Leisure Colony at Iron Horse Music Hall. Doors at 7 p.m., $12.50 in advance, $15 at the door.