Few albums convey the raw emotional intensity of an artist like Octave Records’ latest release, Clay Rose Live at Dharma Barn. It’s a stark, unvarnished presentation of a man and his guitar and nothing more. No sweetening, no overdubs, no studio trickery – just the unrestrained power of Clay Rose and his darkly-stained poetic songs.
Clay Rose has been writing music and recording since 1997, as a solo artist and with his award-winning band Gasoline Lollipops. He is the son of an outlaw father and a Nashville number-one winning country songwriter mother, and spent much of his life traveling between the Colorado mountains and the backwoods of Tennessee. His many miles of traveling, touring and living are reflected in his weathered voice and no-nonsense acoustic guitar playing. Clay Rose Live at Dharma Barn features 14 original songs and a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Lover, Lover, Lover.”
The recording quality is remarkable. Unlike typical recordings, no compression or limiting whatsoever were used, in order to preserve the tremendous dynamic range of Rose’s intense singing and playing. The Dharma Barn is an intimate venue with exceptional acoustics, making it ideal for capturing Rose’s live performance with Octave Records’ Pure DSD 256 high-resolution DSD recording system.
His voice was captured using a vintage Coles ribbon mic, and the guitar was recorded using an AKG condenser mic. A stereo pair of AKG condensers were placed about halfway into the room for ambience and for recording the audience. In addition, Rose used a cheap no-name mic to get the strange faraway vocal sound on songs like “Kill the Architect” and “Milk and Honey” (where he calls his woman his sustenance, declaring, “do you know what that word was, that washed away my pain/It was your name”).
Clay Rose does not look at life with blinders on. A deep humanity and awareness runs through his songs. In the song “Blind,” he sings, “And the night comes easy to those who fear the light.” “Full Steam Ahead” is a romantic vision of his father’s life as a hobo turned cross-country truck driver before Rose was born: “It might be hell for a Christian but it’s heaven for a tramp.” In “Honey, I Confess,” he confides, “Some folks stick together like a warm coat in cold weather.”
The sense of Rose being right there performing in front of you is startling. His voice goes from a whisper to almost frighteningly intense during his loudest declarations. Every nuance of his nylon string guitar playing, which he plays using both pick and fingers, can be heard as if you were in the audience, from the low-end power of the guitar’s body to the astounding clarity of the strings and the way the upper harmonics of the guitar ring out into the room. Rose’s playing goes from all-out strumming to delicate quiet passages where the space between the notes becomes as important to the music as the notes themselves. The bare-bones arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s “Lover, Lover, Lover” is harrowing in its directness.
Rose ends the album on a wry note with “Working for the Devil,” where he notes, “So I traded wings for freedom/where I’d be down here singing/in the dregs and demons choir,” and, “When the angels cry for me/it’s just pure jealousy.”
Clay Rose Live at Dharma Barn was recorded and mixed by Paul McGowan, with Jessica Carson as producer and recording and mixing assistant, and Terri McGowan assisting. The album was mixed at Octave Records’ studios and mastered by Gus Skinas.
The disc is made using Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM.
I had an uninhibited talk with Clay, which follows.
Frank Doris: Where does this music come from? You're obviously singing from the heart, and I would have to think from personal experience.
Clay Rose: Well, I like to say that all the members of my band graduated from university with a degree in music. And I graduated from the school of hard knocks with a degree in music and songwriting. It just comes from a checkered past and a rough childhood and hanging with rough people for the first half of my life.
FD: I know you traveled a lot and got exposed to a lot of different environments. The album doesn’t sound like you went to prep school and Harvard.
CR: No, no, not at all. And it was different flavors of crazy, whether I was in Colorado or on the road with my dad or out in the sticks in Tennessee, especially before my mom got sober. She got sober when I was 10. But before that, it was just total chaos. And even after that, it was total chaos because the pendulum swung to the extreme opposite end, and then everybody had to go to therapy and AA and rehab and all that sh*t.
FD: I have a family member who completely screwed up their life with alcohol, and I know it can be extremely difficult on everyone. So I can understand. That alone is enough to make life tough. And you mentioned to me that when your father drove a truck, you would be sitting in the right front seat as a passenger.
CR: That's how I spent most of my summers, riding shotgun in an 18 wheeler. By the time I was 15, I'd been to all the continental US states and most of the provinces in Canada and half the states in Mexico.
FD: So you literally spent a huge portion of your life on the road.
CR: Yeah; I wrote a song on an older album called “Homesick Remedy.” It's about feeling homesick all the time. But when I tried to pinpoint what I was homesick for, all I would see [in my mind] was I-80 in Nebraska or I-5 on the West Coast. The most constant home I had was the front seat of that truck.
Clay Rose. Courtesy of the artist.
FD: There's a line in the song, “Burns”: “waiting for mama to turn on the light, but she never did.” That sort of puts what you just said into perspective.
CR: There was me and my half-sister and my two stepsisters living in that house out in the sticks in Tennessee. And before my mom and stepdad got sober, we were just on our own. We were like latchkey kids, and we lived out in the middle of the country, so there were lots of miles to run [around] in the woods. And that's just what we did, especially in the summer. They were both working 12 hours a day, so we would just run in the woods and get into trouble.
I know my allies and I know my enemies. Alcohol never served me musically. It would just ruin a show. Even two drinks. Same thing with cocaine. It's a terrible drug for music. It speeds everything up, [you play at] double tempo and you think you're still dragging. It's terrible. But psychedelics and pot, those I can play on.
FD: How much of this do you want to have on the record?
CR: I'm an open book. I always have been. When it comes to other people's news, I’ve got to be careful about it, but my own story, I don't mind sharing it.
FD: We know that drugs and alcohol are part of the music scene. We’ve played countless gigs in bars and restaurants. People are there to drink and socialize as much as they are to play and listen. And we've seen people who have absolutely ruined their lives.
CR: Oh, I've lost, I've lost a lot of band mates, dead and gone.
FD: I ask this question all the time, about why some people can have a couple of drinks and be OK. And for others, alcohol ruins their lives, and then others are able to overcome it and get sober.
CR: I think that there are multiple answers to that question. I think some people [have a problem] on a biological level, and it doesn't matter what their childhood was like or anything, they have a propensity to drink and to not be able to stop. And then I think there are a whole lot of people that drink like alcoholics, but they're not. It's the fact that they have untreated trauma, that they're medicating. And they have an aversion to therapy or psychotherapy or psychiatry, and so they just try to deal with it.
FD: Dealing with, well, life, is a never-ending process. And we’ve all gone through tough times. The feeling of your music comes through. The first time I heard the album, it didn’t really hit me. But I know from experience that albums that really grow on you are very often the ones that you don't get the first or the second or third time around.
CR: I'm not saying that as far as songwriting chops go that I'm in this family at all, but, just as far as how palatable the sound is, it's similar to Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, or anybody that doesn't sound traditionally pleasing to the ear; Neil Young, these kinds of strange, unique voices. At first you just hear the sound, you don't hear the words. I know for me, it took a long time for Dylan to grow on me, and Neil Young.
FD: Oh, I have friends who say they can't stand Neil Young, and I’m like, what's wrong with you? Are you guys out of your minds?
CR: It's his voice. It's the voice, and it's his really abrasive guitar tone and all that. And now those are the things I love the most.
FD: The first time I heard Talking Heads, I was like, what the heck is this? And after a while, I just fell in love with their first album (Talking Heads: 77). David Byrne once said, “the better a person’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.”
And I've also always liked really loud, noisy rock. When I was growing up, it was Cream and Hendrix and Black Sabbath and Grand Funk for me, and not Cat Stevens. Later, I grew to appreciate him.
CR: My mom's record collection was mainly honky tonk and songwriters from the Seventies. My dad's record collection was mostly psychedelic rock and folk music from the Sixties. And then my older sister, who was an equal influence on me, that was all punk and alternative rock and hard rock. So I was really influenced by all three of those sounds, and I feel like they're sort of the main ingredients in my music.
FD: You got to hear the best of everything! (laughs)
CR: I mean, I feel like I did, but I guess every generation [feels] like our music was the best. Yours sucks. But for me, it's everything from basically ’64 to ’74, and then the alt and punk scene from ’82 to ’94.
FD: Every generation feels like their music was the best, and then it went downhill from there. There’s still great music out there, but...
CR: There is. But most of the new acts that I like, they're all doing kind of a retro fallback. They're not playing modern pop. They're all doing a revised version of the classic honky tonk thing that was going on in Austin in the Seventies, or they're doing a revival of Motown. I like those [kinds of] acts, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around modern pop. It feels like bubble gum stuck in my teeth.
FD: My problem with a lot of today’s pop music is that it feels like it's music by committee. Created by a bunch of marketing people are sitting around a table.
CR: And that's where I feel [an empathy with] folk singers, anybody that really is writing for the sake of the song. And I think we kind of have job security when we're talking about the future of music and the fear of AI. The modern pop songs could easily be replaced by AI. The more formulaic the music is, the easier it is to replicate.
FD: But not the real stuff.
Did you write “Pop’s Song” from experience? It seems that way, from those lines about going to Los Angeles with stars in your eyes and then walking into this machinery that’s going to devour you, and telling your dad about it.
CR: Yeah, that was a rough time.
FD: If I tried to play a set with just me and my guitar, I’d clear the room. But for you to captivate the audience like you do on the album...
CR: For the first 10 years that I was playing music, I was a solo act, but then for the last 20, I've been playing with the band. So I was just completely out of practice [in playing solo]. And I didn't realize, I guess I had forgotten how different it is just as far as the dynamic range. When I'm playing with my band, I'm always between third and fifth gear. And when you're playing solo, you should really always be between first and third gear.
FD: Interesting way to put it.
CR: Because if you're [just] blowing out in fifth gear as a solo act, I just find it f*cking annoying.
FD: Let me ask you about your guitar playing. You vary it from raw strumming to finger picking, and you obviously know how to do it. How'd you learn how to play guitar?
CR: I just taught myself. When I was 15, my dad taught me how to play “Mr. Tambourine Man” on his classical guitar. So he taught me those three chords, and by the end of the week, I had written three songs with those three chords, and I was just hooked. From the time I was 15 till I was 20, I played an average eight hours a day every single day. It did not feel like practice. It just felt like an addiction.
FD: I'm a guitar player, and I can relate to your playing. In some spots you're just thrashing the hell out of that guitar. In other spots, you're finger picking. There are intense dynamics.
CR: I play a classical guitar, a gut (nylon) string. I play that guitar because that's what Leonard Cohen played. Leonard Cohen is my alpha and omega. He's my North Star. In my book, he's head and shoulders above the rest, so that's why I play a gut string. But then all through high school and middle school, I was listening to a lot of punk rock and playing bass in a punk band. And so a lot of that percussive strumming is the influence of punk rock.
FD: Paul [McGowan] recorded Live at Dharma Barn with no compression or limiting, and most pop recordings are compressed by ridiculous amounts. The dynamic range captures the intensity of your performance.
Are you just playing what you feel in the moment, or are you thinking, I’ve got to be loud here, I’ve got to be quiet here?
CR: No, I was not thinking that at all. [In fact], I never thought about doing this for a living. I just did it. I loved it. I never had any thought of getting a gig for the first five years that I was gigging. People would hear me busking on the street, which I did a lot, and they would say, “hey, there's a coffee shop down the street. You should play there.” And they'd get me a gig. Then at some point I realized I had spent all my time on this guitar and [had] acquired no other skills. I had no fu*king choice.
FD: But it's a very hard life, and I didn't know that when I was a kid. My father was a businessman, and grew up during the Depression, and he felt like you had to do something practical to make a living. And I didn't know that being a musician would be so hard, of course, being a teenager and rebelling against my parents and with my father thinking I would be a no-good bum unless I got a “real” job. I guess what I'm getting at is that it's hard to be musician, but on the other hand, the personal rewards can be just unbelievable.
CR: And there are some of us that just have a really hard time with conformity. I would rather be broke and happy than rich and working for some corporation and have some asshole boss.
FD: If you’re a musician you sometimes feel like you have to do it.
CR: It's a pressure release valve and nothing else does it. Not drugs or alcohol or sex or anything. If I go two weeks without a show, I start losing my mind. And it's like an exorcism. If you play a good show and the crowd is hot and it's packed and people are dancing, it's not just for the band, it's for everybody in the room. It feels cleaner and lighter than when they went in.
FD: And when you’re really in the zone, and so many musicians say this, you just feel like something's coming through you.
CR: Absolutely. There's no thought. There's a lot of awareness, there's a lot of presence, there's a lot of paying attention, but there's no thought. There's no plan. I don't know. You turn into an open window and the wind is just blowing through you.
FD: It's a mysterious thing. And it comes across when you hear it. I hear it in your record. When music is really great, there's that magic about it.
CR: Yeah, it's transcendent. And the music plays itself. You just trust that it's all in your body. You've played it all enough that it's in your body, and you don't have to think to make it happen. Your body knows how to make it happen. And if you can turn your mind off, the body feels the music. The mind thinks about the music.
FD: Is there anything you want to say in particular about any of the songs? “Working for the Devil” has some powerful imagery.
CR: “Working for the Devil” is a fairly recent song. I wrote that about what we were just talking about, about how hard it is to be a musician and that you are making a deal with the devil if you're going into it, because you're in for a f*ckton of suffering. And there is this alternative pathway that's available to us at any time, which is making money. We can quit playing music and we can go make money and we can live the easy life. But that song is about – I'd rather be down here in the dregs and demons choir with all the misfortunate ones who I'm playing for. And that's the perspective I'm playing from. I'm not out here to entertain the elite. I don't want to be sitting with the angels.
FD: But then in a way, it's almost like you’re the lucky one.
CR: For sure. For sure. I'm the lucky one. If God and your angels want you to succeed in life, then, I mean, it depends on how you define success. But if they wanted monetary success for me, then I am failing my angels.
And that's the other thing – because when I really think about it, it could be that it's my angels keeping me from monetary success, because for most of my life, I have to admit, it would've been the death of me. If somebody had handed me a million dollar check when I was 29 years old, I would have been f*cking dead within 24 hours. The only thing that was keeping me alive was my inability to purchase as much drugs as I wanted.
What's really weird is that I have known a couple of songwriters in my life who I thought were some of the best songwriters I've ever heard. And I thought they were like me, like lifers. But they gave it a shot and they didn't get success right away. They spent a couple years touring in a broken down minivan, and they just said, nah, that's enough, enough for me. And they just hung it up, stopped playing and went and became an electrician or whatever. And I don't understand that at all. They didn't feel the same way as I do, even though I would kill to have the talent they have.
FD: Well at times, it really can be discouraging. Playing gigs when no one shows up, or to hostile audiences, or dealing with shady club owners and bad advice from managers...it can grind you down. And you do have to make a living, especially if you have a family.
CR: After my son was born, I went and got a construction job thinking it was the responsible thing to do, but the f*cking job made me miserable. And then I'd be drinking when I got home just to unwind, and I was a miserable drunk bastard. And at some point I was like, well, what's better, showing my son what it takes to follow your dream and not giving up on it and being poor, or bringing in plenty of money and being a miserable drunk asshole? And so I quit, went back to music, and then my daughter was born, and I freaked out again, and I got another job. I managed [to hang on] for two years before I came to the same conclusion. So I think this is it for me, win or lose.
FD: I feel very lucky that I’ve been involved with music and audio most of my life.
CR: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I kind of live by this Eckhart Tolle quote where he says, “don't let an insane world tell you that success is anything more than a single present breath.”
FD: A friend of mine once told me, “you'll never succeed in the business world. You don't have the killer instinct.”
CR: I've been told the same thing, man, because all my bands have always been a complete socialist democracy. Every dollar gets split evenly every way. I believe that if you treat people well and they feel invested in the project, they're going to work harder and they're going to play better, and they're going to do sh*t on the side to help promote gigs and stuff and the more tickets they sell, the more money they make. But if they're making 200 bucks a night, whether we're playing a sold out theater or a bar gig, that's not very inspiring or respectful.
FD: I've had people tell me if you really want to make it in the music business, you have to be ruthless. But I know some people who have made it, and they're some of the nicest people you want to meet. So that could be a music business cliché.
CR: That's just the loudest wheel getting the grease. But I've seen a lot of different models. Leonard Cohen, he's just the prime example of just a stand-up gentleman. I've never heard a single story about him f*cking anybody over.
FD: Well, sometimes you can't maintain your emotional fortitude. Sometimes it just does get to you. We're humans, we're not robots. But I think if you have integrity, even if nobody else realizes it, it comes through, like I said, in this album, your music is so obviously authentic and real. You get this feeling and maybe you don't even know what it is, but you know when you hear it.
CR: I feel like the best results always come with the least amount of energy. You know what I mean? If you're pushing too hard, you're missing it. It should be effortless. It should feel like nothing.
