Spotlight: Clem Snide

Beyond the easy cadences of the songs and the mild nasal drawl of Eef Barzelay's voice, something in the music of Clem Snide inspires a hazy, languid feeling that's tough to shake. Both 1997's You Were a Diamond and the recent Your Favorite Music are filled with images of repose -- not still-lifes, slow-lifes -- wherein spare guitar is engulfed by lush cello and bass arrangements, and the lyrical focus is on the absence of activity.

"For a while, my 'muse,' if you will, was nothing," explains singer-songwriter-guitarist Barzelay. "I would try to write a song about nothing, where nothing happens; about the minutiae of boredom, but to make boredom seem graceful. To try and fill it with sort of magic moments."

The moments are there. Country-tinged pop songs that owe as much to Nick Drake as to Hank Williams, Clem Snide's albums are unlike anything else going. And as for the message ...

"I hate didactic sort of shit -- people that have some sort of propaganda," states the frontman. "You can write a song about coalminers striking, but for me, that's not what it's all about. It's not who I am. My life is not a life that needs to be or can be chronicled. I didn't live through the Depression, I didn't live through wars -- nothing monumental has happened in that sense.

"I grew up in suburban New Jersey, watched a lot of cable TV, jerked off a lot, smoked pot -- typical kind of suburban white-boy existence. So where do you go from that? What do you have to say, as it were, when that's your life?" Then again, with a new LP on the way from spinART in June, The Ghost of Fashion, maybe it was time Barzelay moved on.

"My muse now is love," he laughs. "I now believe that every song should be about love -- love in the sense of the search for love or the lack of love. I think everything is somehow about that. A hate song is in a sense a love song, a reaction. If you're an atheist, you believe there is no God, but you're just reacting. There is a God, you just don't believe it. You could be the most angst-ridden, bitter guy, but you really want love. Right?"