It’s that time of the year when hearts start to wither – when the cold North wind sends chills through our spines. But this year, we’re not alone in our fight against Winter. Massachusetts folk heroes Cloudbelly have returned with a new record. And its first single, “November” is a beautifully constructed pop-folk anthem for the loneliest time of the year.
Cloudbelly centers itself around the songs of Corey Laitman, who grew up in NYC’s anti-folk scene and Signature Sounds record label. Joined by sonic explorers guitarist/noisemaker Sam Perry, drummer/sound-mangler Nate Mondschein, and bassist/keyboardist/arranger Reed Sutherland, Laitman’s songs are funneled through endless experimentation. It’s folk music, but painted with a broad, ambient brush.
Today Glide is excited to premiere “November” ahead of its release date on December 1st. The tune finds Cloudbelly gathering an orchestra of textures around Laitman’s plaintive yet resilient voice. This band knows how to build up to climatic, anthemic moments – the song continues to climb and climb until its final crescendo. As Laitman sings, “Teach me mercy, cold November,” the band catapults the song into a tempered gallop. Its folksy shuffle sounds like the churning of a great river. Layers of vocals, synthesizers, pianos, and pedal steel swirl around the song’s gorgeous description of seasons changing.
Cloudbelly is calling us to interact with our surroundings. They ask us to remember how changes in weather move us so deeply because we are deeply connected to our world. What’s exciting about Cloudbelly is that their intention is so clear in every note. “November” is the sound of bird feathers landing in a field of dried grass. You’ll want to listen over and over again.
Listen to the tune and read our chat with the band below…
Y’all, this is a really beautiful song. How did you approach going into the studio with this one?
Thank you :). It was a multi-stage process — I took the song to the band, we worked out a live arrangement and did a *lot* of pre-production work based on that arrangement before heading into the studio. Nate (our drummer and producer) was so good about sharing the track with the band as it evolved in post-production and gathering and integrating all our feedback, which was very rarely (maybe never?) in conflict. We recorded all the basic tracks and lead vocals at Ghost Hit (Andrew Oedel, West Springfield, MA), Sam and Reed did a bunch of remote tracking at their home studios, and Sam and I traveled to Nate’s studio, Echo Base, to record added vocal layers.
Have songs grown out of the sonic experimentation that y’all do? Has a particular texture or chord inspired something more?
Maybe less “grown” and more “evolved?” Oftentimes (at least in our work together thus far) Corey comes to the rest of the group with songs that, from a writing perspective, are more or less fully conceived. So the sonic play and experimentation is more about finding ways to enliven/add dimension to / recontextualize the writing that’s already happened. That frequently takes the form of combing through old demos or iPhone recordings or lingering instrumental stems and warping them into little repetitive loops or bursts of ear candy; and usually once one of those is incorporated into the mix, the arrangement floodgates open––which is how, in the case of November, things evolved from a relatively simple acoustic folk tune into a computer-crashing monstrosity of a session file.
There is definitely a sort of chain-reaction quality to our production and arrangement style, a lot of one-persons-weird-idea-triggers-the-next-persons-weird-idea directionality that leaves room for some fun musical meandering without ever veering too far off course from the end goal of finishing the song.
Clearly, you all have a lot of strong, creative people in this group. How do you all unite around a single vision? What’s it like to collaborate between so many multi-instrumentalists?
We do! It’s pretty amazing to make sound with a group of folks whose musical visions are so inventive and who are all such excellent technicians in their own right. The effort of uniting around a vision among the four of us has rarely felt like a heavy lift — generally the mood in the studio and rehearsal room is an effusive sense of gameness and enthusiasm for the ideas getting thrown around, and a pretty open attention and sense of possibility as we go ahead and tinker with the contents of each other’s what-about-this moments. Not every idea sticks, naturally, but we’re all conscientious about finding our egos hilarious and fanning the flames of our deep and mutual respect for one another and our respective artistic inclinations. Mercifully, when we hit on something that works, there is almost always an immediate energetic consensus among us about whatever just happened being the way to go.
How does this song fit in with the rest of the record?
Figuring out the track order for this album was a wild puzzle. November sits right between the first song, which is a really driving, anthemic track, and a track with a slower, more melancholy arc. Narratively, it speaks to the desperately hopeful, almost manic part of the process of loss – the “bargaining stage” of grief (I’m not wholesale into the Elizabeth Kubler Ross model of the phases of grief, but I do get a lot from her framing). Sonically, I hear it as perhaps the most radio-friendly and widely appealing song on the album; there’s a gentleness and accessibility to it that makes it easy to digest upon a first listen, unlike many of its sibling tracks. That’s largely the reason we sent it out in front as an ambassador for the rest of the album… It only gets weirder from here!
What do you hope listeners take away from this single and the album as a whole?
Well you know, I always hope our songs might offer a little breath of sweetened time; some good brain / body sensations; a sense of brightness, maybe even some catharsis. I hope it brings folks to the threshold of a kind, reflective space – one that both affirms and puts some air beneath whatever gravity they happen to be bearing up under in the moment. And I hope it makes folks be like damn, I would like that again please.
