Sound Advice: Clem Snide to Play Dazzling, Intimate Show at Southgate House Revival

Clem Snide performs at Newport’s Southgate House Revival on Sept. 17. Photo: Crackerfarm

This story is featured in CityBeat’s Sept. 6 print edition.

Singer-songwriter Eef Barzelay founded Clem Snide as a trio out of Boston in 1991. They steadily gained notice — as well as a couple more band members — through a series of albums powered by a playful, often rollicking songwriting style touching on rock, pop, folk and country, cresting with 2005’s excellent End of Love. But by 2010, amid a series of band-member defections and label and management issues, Barzelay was the last man standing. He soldiered on by himself, playing acoustic gigs in a variety of small-scale venues, including intimate living-room shows.

His most recent endeavor was a podcast, A Life in Song with Clem Snide, in which each episode opens with an ordinary person sharing an often extraordinary, life-altering experience, culminating in an original song written and performed by the man still best known through his long-running band name. The results are typically stark, songs about death and loss, anchored by Barzelay’s distinctive, ache-infused voice. Yet he often leavens things through his wry sense of humor and singular way with words, a troubadour who can’t help but keep going for both himself and his audience.

“Ten years ago, the band became untenable,” Barzelay said in a 2022 interview with Columbus Monthly. “The label went out of business. The booking agent was gone. The publisher was gone. After doing this for 10 or 15 years, everything pretty much went away for me. Starting then, I had to rebuild myself, and part of rebuilding myself was writing those more personal songs for people. And the more I wrote for other people, the more I wrote for myself, too. And the more I opened myself up and the more I put out, the more came in.”

One of the songs he wrote in the wake of the podcast series is the haunting “Kamikaze Cockpit Blues,” which opens with this observation, “Oh, I feel like death, I feel like death is not failure/Oh, I feel like death is not, death is not surrender.” Barzelay utters the words “failure” and “surrender” with a curiously plaintive delivery, suggesting he’s not so worried about what might happen beyond our current consciousness.

Clem Snide plays the Southgate House Revival at 7 p.m. Sept. 17. Info: southgatehouse.com.

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