Eef Barzelay

Eef Barzelay didn't really plan the solo career that has resulted in Lose Big, his second album under his own name. It just sort of happened. And yet the former Clem Snide vocalist/guitarist/songwriter notes that in many ways, his newfound solo status was almost predestined.

"The circumstances were sort of the usual ones that end a band's career, but for Clem Snide, it kind of started falling apart almost like the second it started happening," says Barzelay. "I would go as far back as 2001, when Jason [Glasser], the cello player/sounds/tape loop guy, and I started it."

In fact, Clem Snide's roots go back considerably farther. The band began as a punk outfit in Boston in the early '90s, but Barzelay started exploring a more somber countryesque sound in his off-hours. In 1995, he dissolved the band, and he and Glasser moved to New York where Glasser performed as Fruit Key and Barzelay played solo acoustic gigs. They ultimately reconnected, resurrected the Clem Snide name, Glasser switched from bass to cello, violin and tape effects, and the band's spooky, electronic alt.country began to attract a small but fervent audience.

But, as Barzelay has claimed, there was trouble from the start. The first Clem Snide indie album, You Were a Diamond, created a buzz that garnered it a Sire contract, but the band was unceremoniously dropped before the release of its major label debut, 2000's Your Favorite Music. The band's line-up remained in a state of flux, with Barzelay and Glasser the only constants.

Signing to spinArt, the band released 2001's The Ghost of Fashion to great critical acclaim. "Moment in the Sun" eventually became the second-season theme song for the TV show Ed, and 2003's Soft Spot and 2005's End of Love earned positive reviews but suffered from decreasing sales.

Prior to the recording of End of Love, Glasser departed to marry his girlfriend and concentrate on his visual art career, effectively ending the core sound that had sustained Clem Snide for nearly a decade. In 2006, while Barzelay was in the midst of recording the proposed epic sixth Clem Snide album, Hungry Bird, he released his debut solo album, the all-acoustic Bitter Honey.

"Bitter Honey wasn't even like a real record," says Barzelay. "The first half I did with [Ben Folds engineer] Joe Costa in like three hours. I played all the songs, we mixed them and we were done. I had no intention of trying to flesh them out or get the band involved. The second half was stuff I had laying around that I thought was pretty good. I probably shouldn't have put out that record but I was kind of desperate so I cobbled together what I had at the time. That's been my downfall. I work with what I have at the time and I make a record. Every record is a reflection of the circumstances under which it was made, but I don't think people care or appreciate that. I think people would prefer to have a great, full-on record."

At that point, Clem Snide began to fracture. The generally tenuous nature of Clem Snide's line-up unraveled. Barzelay and longtime guitarist Pete Fitzpatrick had a falling out and Barzelay was on his own.

"I worked on that record for a long time," says Barzelay of the last, as-yet-unreleased Clem Snide album. "I had a sense that Clem Snide's days were numbered, so it's a dark record. In my own life, there was some dark shit going on. In the process of making Hungry Bird, it all came to a head. For me, Clem Snide was always about a group of friends that all met in Boston in the early '90s and we had this group of dudes and I loved and respected them all. Clem Snide was about that open and friendly spirit. I'm not a particularly good bandleader, I'm very laissez-faire about it all, and maybe that created some of the problems."

Barzelay completed work on Hungry Bird, which he hopes could see the light of day this year sometime, and sent it around to industry friends but it was met with adverse responses.

"People were like, "Ooh, man, I don't know about this record,'" says Barzelay. "I was already feeling like my days were numbered in the music business. I'm married and have a kid, so there's a certain amount of pressure. I foolishly chose this as a career. I never meant for this to be a career but that's where it ended up. So after a two-year process, the Hungry Bird bubble that I was hiding in finally popped and I realized that Clem Snide was over. I had a bitter break-up with my Clem Snide manager, and both of my labels sort of dissolved and I lost my agent. But out of that, I also felt desperately liberated as well, and I wrote most of the Lose Big songs literally in four or five days, one after another."

By happenstance, just as Barzelay finished the first batch of Lose Big tracks, old friend Ben Folds offered him the use of his Nashville studio space (Barzelay had moved to Music City in 2005), which he eagerly accepted. Folds' in-house engineer, Joe Costa, helped Barzelay lay down his new tracks and a new, more hopeful album began to shimmer into view.

"Then we got Jared Reynolds, who plays bass with Ben, and he came in and really helped me finish the record and brought some shape and focus to it," says Barzelay. "He played bass, did back-up vocals and played some piano. So basically me, Jared and Joe made this record. The record was written in a week, and also made in a week, so I had this brand-new record written, recorded, mixed and mastered in like less than a month's time, after two years of working on this other record. God was kind to me. There is a balance in the universe. You get fucked with something and you usually get something back. Lose Big is God's gift to me and my gift to the world now."

Just prior to working on Lose Big, Barzelay received another big opportunity in the form of providing the score to the indie film Rocket Science. Director Jeffrey Blitz used two Clem Snide songs in the soundtrack and approached Barzelay with the idea of scoring the movie itself.

"That was another major break for me, because it did well at Sundance," says Barzelay. "That got my little foot in the door with doing movies. I did one other movie last summer. It's called The Yellow Handkerchief, a drama with William Hurt and Maria Bello. It's a good movie. Me and this other guy, Jack Livesey, did the music for that."

The timing of the movie work was fortuitous for Barzelay. In a number of significant ways, the process of scoring movies helped him to better understand the structure of his own compositions.

"I'd never been that musical," says Barzelay. "I'd always let someone else deal with the arrangements but in doing the movie score, I found that I focused my brain on that, and I didn't have to worry about lyrics so much. And they were letting me do stuff on Garage Band, and a lot of that music serves the movie in a serendipitous way. So in doing that, I got more confident in my musical sense and orchestrating music and hearing different parts. If anything, I might have applied that more to Hungry Bird, when I was finishing that. With Lose Big, I didn't even have time to think about it. It literally came together so instantaneously, that I think all three of us thought, "Let's not fuck with this.' On the songs themselves, I felt like I was channeling people. It was an intense sensation to feel like I just saw this other person's life, random people. I don't know what accounts for that - string theory or something. It felt great. Maybe I just needed to step outside myself. A lot."

Eef Barzelay, Miranda Sound: 8:30 p.m. Thursday, June 26 at Beachland Tavern, 15711 Waterloo Rd., 216.383.1124. Tickets: $10.