by Danielle Holian
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah stream new single ‘Down (Is Where I Want To Be)’ off their upcoming album The Tourist, which will be released on February 24.
“It’s a song about embracing a low feeling. Better to feel low than to feel nothing at all,” band member, Alec Ounsworth, commented on the new single.
The forthcoming record is about their soul-searching experiences that shaped their life and futures. “The album was a type of purge. A purge of certain emotional confusion that manifested itself in the last several years. It was not an easy album to make, by virtue of the fact that it was an emotional time for me,” he said.
“I wanted to experiment with packing lyrics. On this album, the lyrics and vocal melody effectively carry the songs, maybe more than anything else. Elvis Costello does this really well on his song ‘Beyond Belief,’ as does Paul Simon on his solo albums. I wanted not to overdo it lyrically, but do try to squeeze as much as I could out of certain phrases,” he said.
“I am a relatively solitary person and seem to work best alone. I do count on others to help the project as the process of making and releasing an album moves forward, but if it doesn’t match what I have in mind, it’s hard for me to really be there for it. I guess this is one reason why the project has been independent all this time. Trust me, I understand that thinking this way is both an asset and a liability,” he said.
“I’d rather not say that it was a dark time, but it was a difficult time in my life—among the most difficult. But I needed and need to try to let it go. And this is how I let things go. Though it’s the same for any album—this one probably more than the others. But I have to try to do something each time that’s new and engaging for me,” he adds. “I mean, I could very well just write songs the way they were early on. But I don’t think that people would appreciate listening to someone just going through the motions. We have to build something to last, rather than just build it because it looks good at the moment,” he finished.
Written by Danielle Holian (Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook)
The ModernRetro Magazine 