As the lead singer/songwriter and driving creative force behind the popular alt-country indie rock band Clem Snide, Eef Barzelay admits that more often than not, his m.o. as a lyricist was playing ironic head games with people. The ten primary songs on Lose Big, his debut on 429 Records and first solo project since the breakup of the group (and second overall, following his 2006 acoustic date Bitter Honey), are his most emotionally honest to date, cutting closer to the bone as musical autobiography than any of his prolific output with the group. Still, the album title shows that the multi-talented Israeli born, Nashville based artist hasn’t lost his gift for irony.
In evolving beyond his last ten years of touring and recording with Clem Snide—a unit he initially founded in 1991—Barzelay may have lost something big that once defined his life, but he’s been on a major career winning streak otherwise. In 2007, he signed with Impact Artist Management, which also represents Dr. John and The Gipsy Kings. He’s also toured numerous times over the past few years with longtime friend and fellow Nashville transplant, popular singer, songwriter and pianist Ben Folds. Their latest tour was a Midwest/East Coast jaunt in March-April 2008.
Most significantly, in 2007 Barzelay expanded his creative horizons into film scoring, making his composing debut with “Rocket Science,” which won the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Award for Dramatic Directing (Jeffrey Blitz). The film was released theatrically by Picture House/HBO in August, 2007. In its glowing review, The Hollywood Reporter said, “Under filmmaker Blitz’s gifted guidance, technical contributions soar, most prominently composer Eef Barzelay’s smartly wacky score, which splendidly counterpoints Hal’s uncertain world of New Jersey teen-life.”
Blitz, a longtime Clem Snide fan who approached Barzelay with this unique opportunity, also included two of the band’s songs on the film soundtrack, “Do You Love Me” (from their 2002 EP Moment In The Sun) and signature tune “I Love The Unknown” (from Clem Snide’s second album, 1999’s Your Favorite Music. Barzelay’s first foray into the film and TV world came in 2001, when his Clem Snide song “Moment In The Sun” was used as the theme song for the second season of the NBC comedy-drama series Ed.
Writing and recording Lose Big much more quickly than any of his releases with Clem Snide, Barzelay worked on the project primarily with Folds’ bassist Jared Reynolds (the project’s co-producer) and engineer Joe Costa (Folds, Hank Williams, Jr., Michael McDonald), who also played drums. The collection, which features ten original tracks plus two previously unreleased Clem Snide cuts (“Me No” and “Born A Man”) and “I Love The Unknown,” emerged from the ashes the band left behind after splitting during the recording of Hungry Bird a project the singer calls our “epic mammoth conceptual post apocalyptic record.”
Just as he set aside time to deal with the emotional fallout from the band’s breakup, Barzelay was presented with a serendipitous opportunity to use Folds’ studio. The more distance he put between himself and Clem Snide, the more artistic freedom and “desperate liberation” he began feeling. The creative juices began flowing and he wrote more than half the songs that made it onto Lose Big in less than four days. “We got in there and everything came together so effortlessly,” he says. “We cut all live vocals and most of the songs were done live in the studio, with a few overdubbed percussion parts.
“Because of the more personal nature of the songs, I originally wanted to make it a self-titled album,” Barzelay adds. “But I named it after the mid-tempo rocker ‘Lose Big’ because I thought that song was the closest to home for me. It was inspired by living in Nashville, where everyone seems like a desperate musician struggling to make money and get something going. It’s about facing adult concerns, something we can all relate to. The last new song on the album is the acoustic ballad ‘Song For Batya’ that I dedicate to my mother who passed away a few years ago. It addresses not only the death of a person, but anything we lose in life, career, relationship, even a band.
“I feel like a lot of the people I’m speaking through in these songs are yearning for some sort of liberation,” he continues. “Each song is like its own character that’s a part of me as well. Like a lot of my Clem Snide material, Lose Big gravitates towards older, simpler music because I’m a traditionalist in the spirit of Hank Williams, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. The difference is that lyrically, it’s more ‘grown up’ and has intimate songs that I wrote between the living room and the bedroom.”
As a songwriter chronicling his life and the world around him while also channeling unique characters passing through his consciousness at just the right moment, Barzelay doesn’t hold back. Sometimes, he says, he’s hopeful and optimistic about humanity and other days, he wonders “what’s the use?” The edgy, electric guitar driven opening cut “Could Be Worse” is a self-protest song depicting a wrestling match with his own heart and mind; he should see the brighter side but chooses another viewpoint. The wistful “Girls Don’t Care” is the cheekiest song on Lose Big, a playful way to mess with the artist inside himself. He sees “How Dare They” as a spiritual cousin to “Could Be Worse,’ where he’s poking fun at his own inner life; it was inspired by the Zen exercise of stepping outside of your self for a more objective view.
Several tracks are slightly less personal and find him giving voice to unusual and quirky people lurking for a time in his creative space—among these, “Take Me” (hallucinations of a 15-year-old runaway girl) and “Numerology” (a new age L.A. wannabe hustler.) Barzelay gives his lifelong spiritual questioning an outlet on the booming, ominous and slow burning “Apocalyptic Friend” (his response to those wacky Bible Belt bumper stickers about the rapture), the plaintive “Make Another Tree” and the heartfelt acoustic folk tune “True Freedom.”
Naming his band after a character in several novels by avant-garde, Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, Eef Barzelay formed Clem Snide while attending college in Boston in 1991. The first edition of the band was created to perform his earliest songs, and the sound was dominated by punk-jazz inspired dissonance with abrasive guitar lines and bleating saxophone. While this early lineup played out occasionally and released a pair of 7” singles on a local label, Barzelay became disenchanted with both the band and the city of Boston, and the group split up in 1994.
A few years later, Barzelay met back up with the band’s original bassist, Jason Glasser, and began writing songs again, performing under the name Fruit Key. After adding a bassist and drummer, they reclaimed the name Clem Snide, began recording songs and performing, and in 1998 issued their debut album, You Were a Diamond. They earned enough major label attention to release their second recording Your Favorite Music on Sire Records. Their subsequent albums—The Ghost of Fashion, Soft Spot, End of Love and two volumes of Suburban Field Recordings—were released by spinART Records.
“The artwork on the cover of Lose Big is another unique way of expressing the basic themes and ideas I’m writing about on the album,” says Barzelay. “The rabbit walking off with the hunter’s rifle represents nature and our natural honest self, while the hunter signifies the darker, selfish and foolish aspects of humanity. Even if I’m still asking questions that don’t have concrete answers, I genuinely feel I’m getting deeper as a songwriter and I’m very satisfied with what I’m conveying here.
“I’m looking at the launch of my solo career as a change to grow and learn from the mistakes of the past,” he adds. “But even during the hardest times—and all bands, indie and otherwise, go through a lot for their music—I’ve truly cherished those times when I’ve connected onstage with the audience. Those are the precious moments I am always yearning for, and it’s great to still have the opportunity to share myself with the world this way.”
Source: http://www.eefbarzelay.org/bio
