Clem Snide (2009)

It’s not every day or month or year that one of the best songwriters of the decade shows genuine excitement at the mention of a small city they’ve played, ohh, twice in their almost 20-year working lifetime. But within 10 seconds of our phone conversation, Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay realized what city I was calling on behalf of. “Yeah, Fort Wayne!” he said - almost barking. “Fort Wayne is awesome.”

Nope, you don’t get that everyday, Fort Wayne.

I had heard friends buzzing about this months ago. Word was out that Barzelay truly loved his late summer show at Fort Wayne’s Tiger Room venue last year. Supposedly he even ended up at The Brass Rail later in the night, singing and drinking with locals.

“Yeah man, me and some guy ended up singing along together with ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,’” Barzelay said. “It was an inspired night.”

Inspired enough that, after reforming his band, Clem Snide, and releasing a great new record, Hungry Bird (see review on page XX), Barzelay went out of his way to make sure to return to Fort Wayne. He did it just like that, not a breath in between moves: get band back together; get album said band recorded some three years ago out on shelves; book a show in Fort Wayne, Indiana with band. Career moves - Fort Wayne style.

“The way it works for me is that if someone goes out of their way to have me or Clem Snide come to their little city, and then a bunch of people show up and profess their love for me, I try to come back next time I come around,” he laughed. “It’s only happened in a couple of places. There are weird little pockets, you know, where people are into it, you know. Into Clem Snide disproportionately.”

Scheduled to once again take the Tiger Room stage (aka Calhoun Street Soup, Salads & Spirits, located at 1915 S. Calhoun St.) is Barzelay. Err. Scratch that. Scheduled to perform on March 23 is Barzelay’s once - and now again - band, Clem Snide, the band responsible for classic records like 1999’s Your Favorite Music, 2001’s The Ghost of Fashion and 2005’s End of Love.

“If I could make my living just playing little places like Fort Wayne all over the country, I’d be happy,” Barzelay continued, explaining how Fort Wayne nabbed a show on Snide’s brief tour. “There’s this little circuit, you know, of indie clubs. So each time we go out the booking agent just sort of plugs us in to those clubs. Usually the same cities. Bigger cities. So the smaller cities aren’t always so accessible to us.”

Without the just released Hungry Bird, none of this would be happening. Barzelay would likely be at home in Nashville, playing dad, drinking beers, writing songs, loving his wife - stuff like that. But the Bird does exist and, in fact, has for some time now. Not only does it exist, but one could say that it is both the reason the band originally broke up and is now back together.

“I moved to Nashville and Clem Snide started working on this record called Hungry Bird. This was like 2005,” Barzelay told me in an interview last July. “The story of Clem Snide, in many ways, is a sad and tragic one. It started hemorrhaging and dying back in 2001. It was a slow and painful death. Relationships soured, managers f%#@ed up and labels dissolved. It was tough. In the midst of all that, I tried to make one glorious Clem Snide record that was going to be a magnum opus. I worked really hard on it. I was going big - aiming high, you know.

“In the process of making Hungry Bird I sort of destroyed the band. That record is finished now. I finally went back and finished it and I hope to release it someday soon. I just have to find the best way to do it.”

Now, only months since that first interview, the band is back together, the record is out and the band is on the road, headed to Fort Wayne - “painful death” speak no more.

In the time since the “breakup” Barzelay tested the waters of a solo career, releasing two records - 2006’s Bitter Honey and last year’s Lose Big - and playing shows under the Eef brand.

“The two records I made under my own name were made with, I don’t know, a different scene. A different group of people that had a lot to do with Ben Folds,” Barzelay explained. “Ben let me use his studio so I made half of Bitter Honey there with Joe Costa, his in-house engineer. When I went to do Lose Big it was the same thing. Then Jared [Reynolds], Ben’s bass player, got involved and ended up playing bass and doing a lot of the production work. So yeah, for me, those records are separate from Clem Snide. No one from Clem Snide is involved with them aside from me.

“But Eef Barzelay is not as successful as Clem Snide, not in terms of draw. After all that s%#@ went down a couple of years ago with Clem Snide, it felt like it was the end of something with me. It was painful and I just wanted to put the whole mess behind me. I wanted a clean slate, using my own name with no Clem Snide association. That was kind of unrealistic, though. But then this label I’m on wanted to put Hungry Bird out, and I wasn’t sure what to do with Hungry Bird. I didn’t know if it would ever come out, but I was proud of it and wanted it to be regarded as a proper record - as it is a proper Clem Snide record.”

Arriving quietly in late December - a Christmas present for the audiophile set - was word that Hungry Bird may be coming out after all. A few weeks later it was written in stone: Hungry Bird would finally see the light of day. Clem Snide was back in action.

“Yeah, man, people all of the sudden seemed to be excited about it. The general vibe seems to be one of goodwill towards Clem Snide,” Barzelay said. “That’s great, I need some goodwill right now. So I got back together with Brendan [Fitzpatrick], the bass player who has been with Clem Snide since Soft Spot, and Ben Martin, who was in the band since End of Love. We got together and just started playing a bunch of the old songs. It felt great. It was like s%#@, this feels awesome,” Barzelay said. “But, you know, a year or two ago it wouldn’t have felt right.”

Good news for Clem Snide fans everywhere. The band, formed in Boston in the early 90s, has steadily released strong records since their much loved debut, 1998’s You Were a Diamond. Zero bad albums along the way, a fact that made this break-up even more painful.

The sound relies heavily on Barzelay’s contributions. A mix of singer/songwriter folk, jazz, indie-rock, pop and country dictates the wealth of his tunes, but it’s his vocals and writing, really, that lead the way. His voice, textured and diverse, almost always feels like a subtle howl - a man trapped inside the body of a self-defeating, hilarious and way-too-smart artist. His lyrics, written with the wit and charm of flagships as obvious to this writer as J.D. Salinger and Stephen Malkmus, keep a keen eye on pop culture, often working as observational story songs. Tunes that make you think, chuckle, smile and howl along. But not always tunes that grab you by the beard upon first listen.

“I hated [Hungry Bird] when I first went back and listened to it,” Barzelay joked. “And I’ve seen a couple bad reviews. But I went back to it and it got me. It just kind of creeps under your skin. I think that’s how Clem Snide works - we creep under your skin eventually like some sort of rash.”

Agreed.

Agreed so much that, upon talking rashes and creepy skin, the electricity in Barzelay’s house blew out. Strange noises followed - Barzelay stumbling around his dark house, looking for fuses, opening doors and hitting switches. Tripping. Laughing. Trying to keep talking Snide and explain how he’s become a “people pleaser” when on stage - one who isn’t afraid to blast through back catalog classics like “Moment in the Sun,” “I Love the Unknown” and (fingers crossed) “Weird” and “Action.”

“I have like 20 new songs written, you know, and I think about how they might work on a record. I don’t know, it’s up to the God now. The indie rock God,” the prolific songwriter laughed while flipping more switches. “Ideally, I’d like to have another record out around this time next year.”

Before signing off and letting Barzelay, as he put it, “find the light,” I told him how I had three unique strangers - all familiar with me from my writing - approach me after his last Tiger Room show. All three strangers told me similar stories about how they first discovered the Snide in early 2001, back when the band opened a Piere’s show for Ben Folds. Each stranger said that they left that show more stoked about Clem Snide than Ben Folds, and each stranger bad bought every Snide record since.

“Oh s%#@ man, so it does work. That does happen sometimes,” Barzelay responded. “That really amazes me that that does actually happen that way. I’ve had a lot of gigs in my life, over the years, you know, where it’s like … you know … ‘gig of life, gig of a life, you gotta knock it outta the park this time, Eef!’ So, you know, that’d be whispered in my ear by various handlers or whatever over the years. But f&%@ those gigs! It’s always little gigs like the ones in Fort Wayne that you never expected. Those are the ones where you actually end up connecting with people.”

Written by G. William Locke