Deadpan Love

About

Cautious Clay’s first full-length album "Deadpan Love" released June 25, 2021 via The Orchard. The singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has also shared the LP’s new song “Karma & Friends.” Check out the music video, as well as LP art and tracklist, below. "Deadpan Love" includes “Agreeable,” “Roots,” and “Dying in the Subtlety,” which Cautious Clay released as singles last year. He released an EP titled "Table of Context" in 2019, the same year Taylor Swift sampled Cautious Clay’s earlier track “Cold War” for her song “London Boy.” For the album, Cautious Clay collaborated with co-writers like Tobias Jesso Jr., Jim-E Stack, and Daniel Nigro. Deadpan Love also features the Saba collaboration “Strange Love.” - Allison Hussey, Pitchfork “It’s an album about relationships,” Clay says of "Deadpan Love". “It’s about earnestness in those relationships, but it’s also about ambivalence in those relationships—not always feeling like you want to invest in something, but also realizing that nothing really matters, and we have to give things meaning on our own.” Growing up in Cleveland informed his ideas about the way music could sound. The region has produced a host of sonic innovators—from the funk of the Ohio Players to Kid Cudi’s left-of-center hip-hop. "Deadpan Love" continues that free-spirited creativity. The album covers a wide range of genres. “Sometimes it’s like soft rock and indie rock, like ‘Dying in the Subtlety,’” Clay says, “and sometimes I’m more on a classic R&B sound. I like to try different things, and I want to do whatever I want to do.” Clay hadn’t been singing for very long before adopting his stage name, so on "Deadpan Love", he challenged himself to experiment with his vocal abilities. “On songs like ‘Box of Bones,’ I’m stacking my voice as the main melody,” he says. The track represents a more poetic style of writing, inspired by writers like e.e. cummings, Toni Morrison, and Ocean Vuong. The song’s lyrics—“Don’t want to talk/ You get the soap, I’ll take the box” are open for deeper interpretation. On “Wildfire,” Clay bottles up the anxiety that stems from feeling vulnerable in a new relationship. He left his raw vocals as-is, and opted for more direct and active lyrics. “It’s a singular voice and a little bit raspier, a little bit more intimate,” he says. On the album-opening “High-Risk Travel,” Clay pushes his voice into the spotlight, harmonizing with bright guitar licks. The lyrics depict a person risking their physical and mental health to pursue a fraught relationship during the pandemic. And on “Karma & Friends”—the album’s original title—Clay considers how relationships “determine your karma and overall well-being.” The song, programmed with longer “pre-delay on the reverb on the snare,” recalls Outkast’s classic “Elevators.” “It’s sort of boom-bappy,” Clay says, “but also, at the same time, very classical. There’s a lot of dimensions.” What comes through more than anything on "Deadpan Love" is the fact that emotions form the backbone of Clay’s music, and are ultimately what create long-lasting connections with his listeners. “I think the emotion behind the music is the most important part, other than what instrument you’re using or whose voice is on it,” Clay says. “How you deliver is how you dynamically change things. That’s the music that appeals to me most.” - Natelegé Whaley, Bandcamp · July 21, 2021.

via Last.fm

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