Interrogation: Alec Ounsworth (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)

06/28/2012 grant moser Comments 0 Comment

Alec Ounsworth is the lead singer of the indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. They shot to fame in 2005—without even having a record out—through Internet word-of-mouth. They have three albums released to date, 2005’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, 2007’s Some Loud Thunder, and 2011’s Hysterical. The band took a multi-year hiatus in between the second and third album while members worked on side projects. Ounsworth recorded two albums, Mo Beauty under his own name, and Flashy Python’s Skin and Bones. Editor-in-the-field and ladies-man-about-town Grant sat down with Ounsworth to find out what’s been going on.

One of the main ways you have of hearing new bands is playing at festivals.
It’s kind of great. We were at this festival recently in Houston and on our stage Phantogram was playing and the Flaming Lips guys were all there and Erykah Badu’s people were all there. It was really well done, well put together. The night before we were in Dallas and St. Vincent was playing. For the musicians there, you get to catch up with people. I met all the Phantogram people and I had never known them but it was great talking to them.

Do you have any guidelines about playing festivals?
Festivals are really hard to put on and keep organized. Flaming Lips put on a great show, they’re really nice guys. I was talking to Wayne [Coyne] for a while and I really appreciate what they’ve been doing. He gives a lot of advice to the rest of us. We have a connection, on our second record we worked with Dave Fridmann, who does all the Flaming Lips albums. I give anyone who puts together one of these festivals a lot of credit, just for attempting it.

How is it asking people you meet to guest play on albums?
For me, it’s starting to be more and more common. I made that record [Mo Beauty] down in New Orleans with George Porter [from The Meters] and Stan Moore from Galactic. That was mainly Steve Berlin, the producer, who put all that together.

What was the idea behind Mo Beauty?
It had a lot more to do with Steve than me. I just had some songs and Steve organized the whole thing. He tracked down all these musicians. The idea was Steve’s interest in a lot of the material I was working on combined with us loving the city and trying to put forward that there’s all this talent in the city. So we literally pulled some guys off the street outside the studio. Trying to combine our appreciation for the city by exhibiting the talent.

How do you think it came off?
I don’t know. I did go on tour, a pretty confusing tour shortly thereafter. I organized a completely new band. I used three of the guys who were in a Philly band called The Teeth. We went around the country and I don’t know what it was. Were we playing Clap Your Hands or Mo Beauty or Flashy Python? I think we switched names from show to show. Mainly it was Alec Ounsworth, but it wasn’t really well thought out. It wasn’t very good advertising.

Tell me about touring in general.
This last tour [for Clap Your Hands] was four weeks. That’s probably average. I think six to seven is the longest. Hysterical came out in September. We had already gone to Australia, Japan, one tour of Europe, the Midwest and Canada, five shows on the East Coast. You want to do it straight through if you can, it’s hard to reorganize all that again.

What do you like about touring?
I like playing for the fans. I’ve started to meet the fans in select circumstances. I like to get out there and just talk to whoever’s around. It has nothing to do with me or for a pat on the back. It’s more that a lot of people like that. That’s another thing Wayne Coyner does quite a bit. He’s really a people person and chats up everybody. It’s thrilling for a lot of people. When I was the one going to these festivals and I could run into the people that played and have a regular conversation that’s cool. I’ve been trying to do that more often. Especially when the show is good. When it’s not so good I just hide.

Are there any favorite places you like to play?
New Orleans. I always love to play New Orleans. I like playing in Toronto. I like Berlin, I really like Tokyo. I like all of Japan to be honest. That’s maybe my favorite place to go play. Everything is run so well and the audiences are so polite and receptive. We can play anything. We’d play a Nick Drake cover and they’d just shut up, and I’m like, “I’ve never seen this before. I’ll give it a shot.” You go to some other places and people take that as an opportunity to go to the bar and talk.

You’ve been living in Philly for most of your life. When you guys broke in 2005, I was living in Williamsburg, and I considered you a Brooklyn band. How does it work with you here and the other guys in Brooklyn?
That’s the general perception that we’re a Brooklyn band. For the most part I try to get as far along in the songs as possible. It could mean lyrics, vocal melody, and guitar, or I could go a step further where I try to do the drums, the bass, the keyboard, everything. The Internet makes it easier. I can do something on Pro Tools and send the files to somebody.

What is the dynamic in the band?
In the end, I have the last say on things. That’s the way it’s always worked for us. To have a democratic process might work in certain bands, but it usually does not. Everyone has their own opinion so you need somebody to guide it.

Let’s talk about the three Clap Your Hands albums. The first one, the first time I heard it, it reminded me of a carnival atmosphere, fun and a little wild. The second one was….
A gentle fuck you? A lot of people think that I was trying to push away the fickle fans, which was not true. For example, that first song is totally blown out. I think Dave [Fridmann] ran it through this MXR processor which distorted it completely and to be honest, that was what we wanted. It didn’t sound like it was working clean at all, so we had to do something.

What were you trying to do with the second album?
We wanted to take chances. At first, because of all the hubbub about the first album, I wanted to just—and this would have been an absolute gimmick, I’m kinda glad I didn’t do it, kinda disappointed that I didn’t do it—I wanted to actually make a release of just the air conditioner unit, and call that the second record. That idea, just to have fun with it. It would have been having fun with the hype basically. But we did take it seriously. It was kind of a weird record to come into because we had been touring so much. I just brought the songs in a much different form to Dave’s place and some of the guys hadn’t even heard them yet. It did give the producer a lot more to do to earn his keep.

How do you feel about the second album?
I liked it. For the most part, I’ve liked everything.

Do you ever throw on one of your old CDs and give it a listen?
I listened to Flashy Python recently out of curiosity. It’s such a peculiar record, I just wanted to make sure it was any good. I think it is still. I don’t really listen to too much Clap Your Hands, though I did listen to Some Loud Thunder before this record [Hysterical], just because we had taken this time off, I wanted to see what the next step could possibly be.

It was a long time off. Four years?
Yeah, between records. We started working on Hysterical a long time before it was released. Actually, we had the record ready in January 2011. We had to wait to September, that was apparently the right time.

What was going on in your head during that long break? You worked on Flashy Python as well as Mo Beauty.
I don’t know. I don’t always want to work with the same people. There are ways in which each person on a record definitely informs the record, informs the sensibilities. It’s not always that easy, I’m sure for any band, but the fact of the matter is that we didn’t start off like a lot of other bands. We didn’t all hang out together and talk about music and that stuff.

You went to college together right?
We did. But we weren’t playing music together in college. I knew these guys played these instruments and I was working on songs that needed people to play. These guys were not in Philadelphia, but I ran into one of the people in the band now and I gave him some of the stuff I was working on and he was very enthusiastic about it.

The story about Clap Your Hands is you’re the band that broke on the Internet.
I think that’s a little overblown. I don’t think we did anything that drastically different from anybody at that time. We used MySpace, we had a website.

So why did people latch on?
We were playing a lot of shows in New York and people were coming. We were able to play shows at Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom by ourselves before we had a record released. We tried to do an EP, we tried all sorts of things like any other band, but I guess there was something about some of this stuff that people wanted to listen to. Sometimes when you think back on it, it would have been preferable to have more of a gradual transition into it.

You didn’t have a gradual rise, you went straight up.
It would have been nice perhaps to really start touring and opening for people, to learn from what they’re doing. The only opening tour that we had ever done was with The National. It was our first ever tour, and even on that one we had to flip-flop who was headliners.

How did your quick rise affect you?
It made me a little uncomfortable because it didn’t feel like we got to really earn it. I remember doing six weeks in Europe and coming back and having 5 days off and my voice was blown out and I was just exhausted. I remember the first show in Philadelphia, I collapsed. I slid down the wall in the dressing room after we finished. I didn’t know how we were going to finish this tour. My voice was gone, I was like “I’m not going to recover my voice before the next show. What is this? I’ve got to take this a little bit more seriously.” To be honest, that’s another reason, as peculiar as it might sound, to retreat after the second record. I think there was a little bit of wear and tear and it was forcing everyone to get more thoughtful.

During that time you did two albums, Flashy Python and Mo Beauty. What did you get from doing those two solo albums?
Flashy Python was a very unusual process, building the studio in the barn, trying to recruit whoever. For one thing, learning to play with another group of people was new to me. It was a strange time and I think the record reflects that. I wasn’t listening to pop-y stuff. I was listening to Ska Walkers, Robert Wyatt, stuff that’s not straightforward, Captain Beefheart. I got to take a bit more of a chance on Flashy Python than I would with other material. Mo Beauty was a lesson in how to work with seasoned professionals. I went from one record where we were trying to do as weird and wacked out as possible to a very clean studio, where you can really hear everything, and all of those guys are top notch musicians—not that the guys on Flashy Python weren’t, but it was a different game. And Steve [Berlin, the producer] put the vocals way up front which is something I’m very unaccustomed to.

Your vocals are very mixed in with the music normally.
That’s generally how I’ve always wanted it, but he was like, “Vocals way up front so people can hear your lyrics.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” He was right in the end for that kind of record. It would always be nice to have a test run and then actually go through with it, in retrospect. I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I’d never recorded a record like that before, but that’s really the way most people do. Multiple vocal takes? I was like “You want me to do it more than once?” Simple things that I’ve never really been privy too. Even with Dave [on the second record], who is definitely a seasoned pro, we were doing maybe two vocal takes, but that was an aesthetic choice. But with Steve it was definitely a lesson in precision, or at least accuracy.

Let’s talk about Hysterical. It was more melodic, more harmony going on….
There were countermelodies with the keyboard lines. With the keyboard lines I try to weave the vocal melody with it, so it’s kind of overlapping.

With the lyrics, the feel of the album, it seemed you were dealing with issues of permanence versus change, a lot of memory, a lot of looking back.
That whole record was effectively about the idea of trying to run away from that is actually permanent, and what someone should do is resign him or herself to facing up to that permanence.

One of the lines I love from that album [from the song “Maniac”] is “I miss the way you stare at me as if I were a memory.” That really summed up a lot about the album for me. How do you write your songs?
I come up with the melody first, for sure, for the most part. I usually don’t write a song and say I’m going to apply these lyrics. I have tried it before but not very successfully. There are rewrites upon rewrites. But I usually have a decent idea of what I want. A lot of it is just whether the lines are all…whether the mood is touched upon. I don’t want to get too corny with a lot of the stuff, and I don’t want to get too rhyme-y.

Let’s talk about your voice. That’s an important part of the band. Did you grow up thinking you had a good voice?
I remember the music teacher at my high school, Chestnut Hill Academy, he suggested, just by the way I talked, to join the chorus.

Did you try out?
No. I was never that comfortable with my voice. I never would have suspected anything like that.

Later on when you were writing your own songs in college, did you have it in your head that you were going to sing them or someone else?
I was. I remember the first time, I was a freshman at college, playing with a friend of mine and he was very complimentary. We were just playing some Velvet Underground stuff or whatever. That was one of the earlier times where I thought, oh, maybe I can sing. Then certain things started happening where I’d be practicing in the dorm room and people would be knocking on the door, saying “I don’t listen to that kind of music, and I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it.” That sort of thing. Helpful stuff. After college I recorded by myself, but I never really planned on doing anything with it. It was just for myself.

Do you have stage fright?
Oh yeah. I don’t really particularly look forward to going on stage. I do get into it when I do get up there, but I’m pretty nervous before and while I’m up there. It takes a couple of songs. I’m not a natural. I might be a relatively natural performer, but I’m not like an exhibitionist or anything. I don’t like that sort of attention.

But you handle it.
I definitely appreciate people’s interest and I do my best, but I’m not like “I’ve got to be out there in front of a lot of people.”

What did you listen to growing up?
I listened to a lot of oldies when I was little. Like The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and I would try and sing the back-up parts. The Beach Boys, The Beatles.

Sounds like a lot of harmony going on.
A lot. A lot of that seemed very important to me. A lot of what was done with the harmonies on the first record, the songs seemed to me, just like “Some Loud Thunder” on the second, that they needed a nudge. Something’s gotta happen beyond this.

It seems you were much more comfortable putting those harmonies up front on Hysterical.

Yeah, and a lot of that had to do with John Congleton [producer]. He hit upon that as a strong point of the whole project. Similar to Steve and the Mo Beauty record. All the guys I’ve worked with on records have been really excellent. I’m sure there are people who go through records with producers who are like I don’t know if that worked, but I think everything was meant to be what it was. Even at the time when I didn’t really think so from time to time. I’ve been lucky with the guys I’ve worked with.

What’s next?
I’m working on the next record. I feel like it’s more or less ready to go. I have my days set up. From 8 or 9 until lunch I try to do business. I call people I have to call, my manager, my lawyer, publicist, whatever. And then in the afternoon I’ll go over theory and practice. At night after dinner, 8 until 1 or 2 in the morning if I can, I’m just writing. It often happens that you just keep pounding away and pounding away and everything seems terrible and then you get this one [snaps fingers]. Usually it’s versions of old songs that are restructured. Maybe you change the key, change the melody a little bit. The point is that I have hundreds and hundreds of songs that I haven’t done anything with or I don’t know how I want them to be. I’m not sitting on them because I think it’s a good thing, it’s that I think in terms of albums, not songs. Not even as a concept, but as documenting a moment in time. For me, you’ve got to try and capture it at that particular time. For me, I can’t do one song in one style and then do something completely different, I mean you can, but you’ve got to figure out how it all joins. The best records are the ones that sound spontaneous, but they only sound like that as far as they’ve captured this particular moment, how they’re thinking right now.

I think it’s interesting you have all these songs that you’ve written over the years that you mine through.
The songs are going to change. Think about the first and second Clap Your Hands records, even parts of the third; most of those are songs from before the first record. Some of the first record songs are from five or six years before the first record.

So even if for the fourth album you’re starting with a song from eight or nine years ago, you take the song and you’re playing with it to fit into this moment of time now as well as with the other songs you’re working with.
Yeah. It’s not a matter of trying to write a symphony, it’s more a matter of trying to hit upon whatever aesthetic is true and honest. Overall the songs join fairly well.

So the next album is ready to go? Are we talking next year?
I would hope, but I’m not really sure. I think there’s a lot of material that would work well on a record, let’s put it that way.

Super Bonus Lightning Round

What is the best concert you’ve ever been to?
Lollapalooza when I was in Philadelphia when I was 13. Primus was playing, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine. Lot of interesting bands. Tool was great.

When you were a kid, what albums made you sit up and go wow?
I remember listening to Black Flag, the Damaged record. I was probably around 12 or 13 at the time. I also listened to a lot of hip-hop when I was a kid, like Slick Rick. When I was very young, Sgt. Pepper’s, it was like a children’s record to me.

If you could play with anyone, who would it be?
Jelly Roll Morton. I think it would be a very interesting time trying to play with someone like that.

Everyone should listen to _____ before they die.
Aphex Twin has a lot to offer. Not everybody knows about them, which is odd to me. Someone a little more obscure, Robert Wyatt. And Tetsu Inoue, a computer musician. Those guys.

People wouldn’t believe that I love to listen to _____
Depeche Mode. Is that embarrassing enough?