Eef Barzelay has seen many of the highs and lows that a music career can provide. Clem Snide, the indie-rock band he founded in 1991, signed a major-label contract with Sire, recorded the theme song for a season of the NBC comedy Ed, performed on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and received praise from critics near and far. None of that, however, translated into real money, and the group was dropped by labels, abandoned by managers and torn by internal dissension. The nadir for Barzelay came when the Nashville resident had to file for bankruptcy in 2011.
By 2016, Barzelay was contemplating waving the white flag and taking a day job to support his family. That’s when a fan from the band’s still-loyal network of supporters sent him a video of Scott Avett singing a Clem Snide song during the encore of an Avett Brothers show. Another fan sent an interview with Avett praising Clem Snide’s music. Barzelay reached out to Avett through management, and soon the two men were trading emails, and then song ideas. Just when Barzelay was falling off the cliff, Avett tossed out a rope of encouragement.
The result is the new Clem Snide album, Forever Just Beyond, produced and co-written by Avett. Also featured on the record are The Avett Brothers’ drummer and cellist as well as Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor. But the sound is classic Clem Snide: Barzelay’s quirky voice singing contrarian lyrics about pop culture and philosophical assumptions, all set to luscious chamber-pop music, full of sharp-hooked melodies and pillowy harmonies.
“The bankruptcy was a kind of death,” Barzelay says over the phone from his car. He’s parked at Edwin Warner Park, his daily escape from coronavirus isolation. “This record is me trying to express my quest to start over. My mother died at 58 from cancer, and that showed me you can’t bring anything with you. That let me know that material things aren’t important; what’s important is what people refer to as ‘spiritual.’ I just turned 50. Your pain is a gift. If you look at it that way, you’ve cracked the code. If you don’t just say you’re grateful for your pain, but are really grateful, you’ve won. It’s hard, but it’s not supposed to be easy. Maybe this pandemic deepens that.”
In 2016, long before Avett met Barzelay, Avett stumbled onto the Clem Snide catalog through the Jason Molina station on Pandora. He’d heard the name before, but not the music. Once Avett listened to the band, their music immediately struck him as some of the most appealing he’d heard in years.
“I just dove in and devoured the whole catalog,” Avett recalls, calling from his home in North Carolina. “[Barzelay’s voice] felt like my voice — not that it sounds like mine, just that I shared it. The vulnerability was there. It sounded like spiritual music that couldn’t be binned in a record store, because it transcended all categories. If I’m getting way into somebody, geeking out on their music, that seeps into my own writing, all those inflections and phrasing.”
After exchanging some songs over the internet, the two met in person at Avett’s studio. It turned out that their shared sensibilities meshed even better than expected.
“We had a shorthand communication right off the bat, so that told me a lot,” Avett says. “There’s not a lot to be said when two musicians know what they’re there for. We talk a lot more when we get into the trenches about Christian mysticism and non-Christian mysticism. What started happening was the songs took on the voice of a character that was not exclusively him or me. Even if he wrote all the lyrics, the song wouldn’t have happened if not for those discussions.”
The album’s opening track is “Roger Ebert.” It’s the latest Clem Snide song about a pop-culture figure, following takes on Corey Feldman, J.D. Salinger, Joan Jett and Enrique Iglesias. (The band’s name is taken from a character introduced as “a professional asshole” in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.) The song opens gently with Avett’s piano and Mike Marsh’s mallet drumming. “Did you know these were Roger Ebert’s dying words?” Barzelay croons in a low tenor. Joe Kwon’s cello enters and Barzelay adds, “It’s all an elaborate hoax.”
“Roger Ebert saw behind the veil right before he was dying,” Barzelay says. “The implication is that this life is the dream and upon death you awaken to the true reality. I come from a very secular world, so it feels strange to hear myself talking this way. I’m only trying to write a good song, so anything that helps me align with that energy is a good thing.”
The lyrics come from the dying film critic’s final words to his wife, as she recounted in a later interview. Ebert was saying that our daily preoccupations are merely a distraction that keep us from the more crucial concerns of human existence. “There is a vastness that cannot be contained,” Barzelay sings, “or described as a thought in the flesh of our brain.” And that vastness is suggested by the way the lulling melody keeps expanding in harmonies added by the cello, Avett’s backing vocal and Barzelay’s slow-motion guitar solo.
Eef Barzelay and Scott Avett
The prominent role of the cello on this album brings Clem Snide back to the sound of its first four albums, released between 1998 and 2003, when Jason Glasser was the resident cellist and arranger. Avett argues that the cello can be as effective as a country string-band instrument as an orchestral instrument.
Clem Snide started in Boston as a punk band, but by the time they were roommates in Queens, Barzelay and Glasser had developed an utterly beguiling chamber-pop sound that stood out in turn-of-the-century indie rock. Maybe if the sale of Sire Records hadn’t happened just as the band’s album was coming out, maybe if their 2001 tour hadn’t been sabotaged by 9/11, maybe if Glasser hadn’t moved to France in frustration, they might have achieved the renown the critics were predicting.
“If you’re seeing a band at a club with more than two people onstage and the club isn’t sold out,” Barzelay points out, “the band’s not making much money. I had the publishing deal because I wrote all the songs, so I had this revenue stream that no one else in the group had. That broke up our band the same way it broke up The Go-Go’s. We ended up as a power trio traveling in a minivan and staying in one motel room. There was never a moment when I felt we’d made it. People wrote some cool stories about us, and people came to see us, but we were always trapped in the indie ghetto.”
Barzelay moved to Nashville in 2009. In the wake of his bankruptcy, he offered to write a song for any fan who would pony up $200 (later $300). A person would email the sentiments to be included in the song, and Barzelay would translate them into lyrics and melody, record the results and email the finished song back.
“It had a Cyrano de Bergerac quality to it,” he says, “because eight out of 10 times, one-half of a couple wanted me to write a love song for the other half. It wasn’t like co-writing in Nashville, which hasn’t worked for me. What made this different was these people were speaking from their hearts. If they’re writing a song for the wife, there’s a sincere emotional energy in it, and that’s what you need for a song. I’d recommend it to other songwriters. You’d think you’d be using up your supply of songs, but in fact I wrote more of my own songs.”
An echo of those Cyrano songs can be heard on “The True Shape of Your Heart” from the new album. The narrator pledges himself to his lover, promising to stay with her through times of “the dark shade of fear” as well as times of “the bright shade of grace.” Evoking those inevitable seasons in every person’s life are the world-weary sighs of Barzelay’s lead vocal and the high-pitched oohs of Avett’s harmony.
“We were talking whether this should be an Eef Barzelay record or an ‘Eef Barzelay and Scott Avett’ record,” Avett says. “It seemed to me like a follow-up to Girls Come First, the 2015 record he did pretty much by himself — the first of his records that I heard. I said, ‘If that was a Clem Snide record, this one should be a Clem Snide record.’ I was just giddy about the idea that I could be in Clem Snide for a minute.”
