Oh Hell Yeah: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah celebrates the 10th anniversary of its landmark debut

In 2005, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah released its eponymous debut album to an immediate flurry of praise, largely from fawning music bloggers. Self-released, the album was one of the first to demonstrate the power of social media and blogs like Pitchfork to promote unsigned bands. On a break in the midst of an extensive anniversary tour, itself preceded by a solo, acoustic “living room tour,” frontman Alec Ounsworth spoke with HPR from his home outside of Philadelphia.

High Plains Reader: You’re on one hell of a tour now; I was looking at your schedule, and there’s like 39 dates or something?

Alec Ounsworth: [Laughs] Yeah, sounds about right. I’ve lost track, but it ends with this flurry of shows down in South America, which is gonna be great. It’d be even better if we had a couple days to spend in each city, but it looks like we’re gonna go in and go out, and go in and go out.

HPR: That’s a bummer. You like to check out the places that you play?

AO: Yeah, I love to. And we’re gonna have a couple days in Mexico City, which I’m excited for, but other than that, it’s pretty much every day that we’re flying in, playing a show, flying out the next day, playing a show in a different country that night.

HPR: So obviously you must really enjoy playing live, otherwise I don’t know why you’d put that many shows on the docket.

AO: [Laughs] I do, I do. And another reason why we all go out on the road as often as we do is that that’s how we make our living now more than anything else, really. To be honest, I do like going around and playing smaller clubs. I like playing to not too many people. I don’t particularly like playing big festivals if I can help it, but sometimes they can be great. I do like to go out and play live. That’s the short answer [Laughs].

HPR: What is it that draws you to a more intimate setting?

AO: I like the challenge of having to rework the songs. Sometimes I go back to kind of how I started writing them in the first place. I never really played them on acoustic guitar, so bringing them back to make them work in a more intimate setting is a challenge.

HPR: You’re celebrating an album released 10 years ago, where, normally you’d see older bands that maybe put out an album 40 years earlier celebrating in such a way. What compelled you to embark on this anniversary tour?

AO: 10 years, for me, seems like enough time to arrange it. Honestly, I don't know if in 20 years I’ll be that comfortable revisiting the first album [laughs]. I think it's a good opportunity to present it to the audience in the way that it was recorded. So for me, it was a good opportunity to revisit the songs in that particular order, which we never really did in the past. It was a pretty precise order; one song was meant to run into the next. That’s a 38-minute album, so when we got started, we had to sort of fill in the gaps one way or another. Also, we didn't really play "Sunshine and Clouds" and "Clap Your Hands," which were unnecessary to play [at] every show in the first couple years. So for me, to put it together and make it stand up was a challenge. I wouldn't say it's a gift, but it's a nice thing for the audience to be able to witness 10 years off.

HPR: The album obviously is something worth celebrating, if you're going out on a 10th anniversary tour. NPR has listed it as one of the most important albums of the previous decade. Do you think that has affected your songwriting in some way?

AO: Not really. I have a certain perspective on that album, and I don't really think of those songs as anything that documented a particular time, so basically, for me, that one is no different than the other three. Whether or not people attach themselves to something in particular has little to do with me. I feel like the songwriting is getting better, but I think that that album was the first time that [people] had heard “Clap Your Hands.” I think that's the main thing.

HPR: As an artist, you don't really want to be tied to just one album, when you've made other records -- solo records, records with other bands, other records with the band [Clap Your Hands Say Yeah] -- since.

AO: I mean, yeah, I’ve made five other records, and, in a way, it's almost like me putting this one to bed, a little bit, you know? [laughs] I'm moving forward.

HPR: You talk about playing it front to back live. Now when you're doing 50 shows within the span of like six months, how do you keep from going crazy by the end of the tour, playing the same thing 50 times?

AO: You schedule breaks like this one [laughs]. I don't feel like there are a lot of clunkers in the first album -- or any clunkers -- so I sort of feel pretty confident about all the material on that record, and I know that the songs are strong, so I don't really get that tired of them.

HPR: The 10th anniversary edition of “Clap Your Hands” comes with the solo acoustic treatment that you'd been doing on [an] earlier tour this year.

AO: Yeah, it's a variation on how I approached the songs. One thing I like to do is play with each setting, and for the living room shows, it really kind of depends on the room, how I’m going to play the songs. If it's a big room, I tend to go a little harder on the guitar, more strumming than picking, and also singing, in some ways. I discovered that pretty early on, and one of the people who has inspired me is Bob Dylan. Even early in his career he shifted how he sang his songs to make it either fit his mood, or fit the venue or fit something else. You gotta play with what you have.

HPR: When you recorded these, you recorded them straight to cassette tape. Was that an aesthetic choice?

AO: Yeah, definitely. I have hundreds of cassette tapes, which date back, some of them, 15 to 20 years. Ideas, probably complete songs. I’ll go back to them every so often, just sort of looking for old ideas to maybe rework, and I just like the intimacy of someone sitting down and playing into cassette tape. It’s much different than going into Garageband and just trying to lay down some sort of idea. Something about the cassette tape, you feel right there, somehow. It’s a bit like [being] a fly on the wall with a cassette tape.

HPR: As a general rule, do you like to stay with more of an analog recording technique?

AO: Yeah, I’m not that picky when it comes to full-band stuff. I think most of the albums I’ve done I have gone to tape, or at least we've done bass and drums to tape and overdubs sometimes digital, so it’s a bit of a mix. Yeah, I am a bit partial to old recordings and the warmth of tape, but I think that digital has come a long way [so] that it’s hard to tell at this point. But cassette tape is much different; it’s not like three-inch tape or something like that. I was going right into a cassette tape, which, to me, was kind of cool.

HPR: It seems like the people who are embracing tapes now are holding pretty strongly to it.

AO: The new thing where people are releasing their albums on cassette tapes is pretty wild. I never would've imagined that that would've come back. Yeah, this is me running directly into a cassette tape, but to release a proper album on cassette tape? That’s interesting to me. I'm old enough to have bought a lot of cassette tapes back in the day [laughs]. For me, it’s a strange revival.

HPR: These things seem to follow a cyclical pattern. Do you think at some point, 20 years down the line, someone is going to be like "Man, I really want ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ on CD; wouldn't that be so crazy?" when, at the time, that's how it was released?

AO: [laughs] Yeah, I know. And on vinyl. Vinyl’s always been the most important thing, but CD was the biggest deal back in 2005. So who knows? I kind of doubt that that's gonna come back. I think people lean towards vinyl, anyway. But I do think certain things are going to reappear. I was even thinking, for everyone on social media, or bands on Facebook, [posting] "look, at this photograph of a field in Iowa; we're going to Des Moines!” and I’m like, well, maybe it’s time to bring back street teams in certain areas, a few people to just spread the word [laughs]. I do think things are coming back as people are finding it hard to have that human touch.

HPR: Today, bands sort of need social media and really rely on blogs, and obviously the “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah”album has kind of gone down as the first "blog album," so to speak. Do you feel, in a way, responsible for what is now a standard for indie musicians?

AO: Not really. For me, there had to be something unique about the album that made people want to write about it in the first place. If it weren't the case, and we were simply the purveyors of blog rock, then everybody would've had the exact same treatment, you know what I mean? There had to be something, so I feel proud of the fact that we didn't hire any publicity behind us. We didn't push it. We put it out there and let people decide for themselves. So if they decided on a blog, which I guess would have been the equivalent of a 'zine back in the day, then so be it.

HPR: It seems like you guys just kind of put out the record, and almost immediately, it was everywhere. Did it feel like it was moving too fast?

AO: Not exactly, 'cause we'd been playing shows in New York for probably a little over a year before we properly released the album, and we had been moving forward for quite a while before that, and I think it seemed somewhat natural that when we put the album out, that we'd keep moving forward. In a way, I’m a little regretful that we moved forward to such an extent. For example, when we were touring with the National for the first tour, we couldn't just be simply an opening band and kind of get our footing out there, see what it was like to play with another band rather than to have blown up to such a point.

HPR: Do you think things would have been different if you had a more natural progression, something like the National did have?

AO: I’m generally pretty insulated from that sort of thing. I try to make an album that is appealing to me at a particular time. I don't think it was necessarily meant for that sort of public embrace [laughs]. And if it does happen for Clap Your Hands up until a new album, that's just the way it is. [If I] made a work that's entirely accessible, and people seem to like it, chances are pretty good that I’ll lose a lot of the fans that like the next one with the one after that. I don't make records to be popular [laughs].

HPR: From what I’ve seen, you've definitely followed your muses since 2005, doing your own solo albums; you went down to New Orleans to record with George Porter, Jr. [of the Meters] and some of the guys down there. Do you have any other destination recording places you'd like to go, just to get the feel of?

AO: I’d love to go to Mexico and do some work down there with musicians. I’d love to go to Brazil. Maybe I’d steer clear of any places that Paul Simon already went [laughs]. I’d love to work with people in the community. And that's the thing, the New Orleans record was entirely that. It was entirely to make an album with [regional] musicians to shine a light, in a way we'd like, down there.

HPR: I read that you can work on music up to nine hours a day?

AO: [laughs] Yeah, sometimes. Lately, probably the last three hours would have me beating my head against the wall [laughs again]. But usually I can find something to work on, given the hours.

HPR: How do you find the inspiration to keep you going from beating your head against the wall?

AO: You know, I have a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of ideas that will probably never see the light of day, and I just keep going and keep trying 'til I find something. And now, I believe [the song] “Some Loud Thunder” and maybe one other were written in the same blur of the day, and that's what happens. You just keep going and going and going, and then you get a window and apparently, you're able to let some things in, eventually. That's the way I've found it, anyway.