Hot on the heels of last year’s Malcolm Burn-produced Strange Perfume, Stephen Clair and his trio arrive just in time to reignite your summer on September 18th with the brand new 11-song album The Small Hours.
Recorded at the beginning of 2020 in Upstate NY, a minute before all hell broke loose, this is the Stephen Clair album we’ve been waiting for. It perfectly displays the power of his songs and his solid-yet-dangerous trio. It’s spare, taut, fully-realized, and elevated by the muscle of his well-suited comrades – Daria Grace on bass and Aaron Latos on drums. Clair wields a telecaster throughout. You know that glorious Fender sound when things are turned up loud but played (sometimes) delicately. It’s nothing but a trio record. But what chops. All so clean and so present. The band performs with the ferocity and immediacy of one of their late-night live shows, while maintaining a mighty but daring control over the songs. A band has to have played—and played—shows together to go at it with such knowing abandon. If ever there was a Stephen Clair record to be pressed to vinyl, this is it.
Clair penned these 11 songs in the second half of 2019, and true-to-form, there is something for everyone here. Rock and roll songs, jazzy songs, songs about hurricanes, songs for radios and songs for streamers; chicken and pig songs, a touch of noir for people who are consumed, songs for those who consume, songs about Nobel scientists and cheap dates, songs of hope with rooftop escapes, songs where you will sing along, and songs where this rock and roll outfit goes out like a %$#^ing storm over the ocean.
The dynamics throughout this record are a hook in and of themselves. There’s a time of night when one’s mind and one’s surroundings are still enough that only then can certain thoughts be heard. Particular perceptions made. The stories these songs tell are the ones that reveal themselves after last call, or later still, when you’re standing in your kitchen at 4am, trying to get your head around the fact that life is unwieldy in its enormity and insignificantly small, not sure if its the tail end of yesterday or the start of tomorrow.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for “Dorothy,” one of the more unique standout tracks on the new album. Using only acoustic instruments, the band brings together a strong and charming harmonic structure, warm backing vocals and a Bossa Nova groove. Clair dives into his soulful jazz side while also bringing to mind the wry ballads of acts like Cake and Elvis Costello. The intricately picked guitar adds a sense of mysterious enchantment to the track, and the sock puppet visuals offer an oddball depiction of the lyrical narrative.
Clair describes the inspiration and process behind the song:
One of the surprises (for Stephen Clair himself) on the album is this song, “Dorothy.” It has an atmosphere all it’s own that gets to people right away. As soon as I started performing this song at shows, the response from audience members was palpable. They wanted to talk about it. They wanted to hear it again. Even though it wasn’t necessarily recommended to radio, when we kicked this whole thing off, already this is the song that many DJs are choosing to play. It’s the first time I’ve ever set a tune to a Bossa Nova. The story is lonesome and intimate (A lone character out on a date with his ‘phone’, a stand-in for ‘Dorothy’) but also so is this jazzy-ish thing we are doing as a trio. Unlike the rest of the record, ‘Dorothy’ has a backdrop of cool acoustic guitar sounds going on, especially that lead guitar track. I played it on this old Gibson L-40 arch top I picked up for a hundred bucks in the early 90s. I’ve written pretty much most every song on this guitar. Typically, I don’t take it out of the house. But it was so right.
All pumped up about the shared feeling people are getting from this song, I set out to make a pandemic-style DIY, no-budget-whatsoever music video for this, at my desk at home, with my phone, alone, kind of mirroring the song itself.
WATCH:
The Small Hours will be released by Rock City Records on September 18th. For more music and info visit stephenclair.com.
Photo credit: Tony Cenicola
