James Jonathan Clancy - Cosmic loner songwriting

After playing in various Italian underground outfits (Settlefish, Glow Kids, A Classic Education, His Clancyness, Brutal Birthday) and founding the label Maple Death Records, the Italian-Canadian singer-songwriter makes his solo debut under his own name with the first album, “Sprecato” (Maple Death, 2024). We caught up with him at the start of the tour supporting the album to chat about the record and much more.

Let's start with your latest project and then look back. How did "Sprecato" come about? Did it grow out of your collaboration with Michelangelo Setola and your live paintings tied to the book "Gli sprecati" (Canicola, 2019), or did your paths cross while you were both already working on your own projects?

We started together. I had moved from Bologna to London, it was a difficult time for me, when I changed everything: job, relationships, home, city. Michelangelo is a lifelong friend, and I've always collaborated with Canicola Edizioni mainly on translations. I think that seeing me struggling - at least this is just my own take - he said to me: "Do you feel like scoring my plates? I'm working on a book...". But there wasn't any precise goal. So, while I was living in London, he started sending me at night the scans of the plates he drew during the day. And I, half as a game, started sending him back little minute-long recordings made with whatever I had there, so just an acoustic guitar and a synth. This got me back into the routine of writing, and above all I was writing without giving much thought to where this music would end up or not end up, I wasn't thinking about that at all. All the first tracks - which are "Castle Night", "Black & White", "Had It All" - I partly wrote by sending fragments back to him. "Castle Night" is actually exactly the first two minutes of what I had recorded one night in London, except now better mixed and mastered. This freed me up enormously, because when I had no inspiration I had his book - because Michelangelo was putting the book together in the meantime, which then became "Gli sprecati" - and there was this idea of releasing them together. He usually takes ten years to make a book, I usually make an album every year... and actually the opposite happened! He finished it, then it came out and we thought about presenting it live, where I improvised and other parts were spoken-word. Lots of things helped me put the album together, in the sense that I then reopened the projects of what I'd sent him and 50-60% of the album was already there. The rest I recorded afterwards.

Those tracks in fact felt to me like they had a common core, which brought them close to one another... How did you develop these fragments over time and how did the album take shape as its own thing? A work that has real cohesion...

When I started gathering things together, and so there were already 4-5 songs for Michelangelo, I already had a fairly clear idea of the kind of sound I wanted. On one hand I'm a fanatic for folk, gloomy psychedelic loner folk, and I feel more at ease making that kind of music, and on the other hand I have a lot of analog synths and I'm a big fan of proto-ambient, cosmic music, kraut, etc. So I wanted to bring these two things together. I'd made myself a playlist of sounds, in case I went back into the studio, and I also had some references for how I wanted the voice, in terms of actual recording technique. After that I kept piling up parts and pieces, until I sort of stopped, partly for reasons of my own life changes - I have two young kids and a lot of things change - but I'd gotten fixated on the idea that I had to finish the album entirely on my own: I had to play everything, mix everything... it was an obsession of mine.

At a certain point I realized it was impossible. I talked to Stefano Pilia, because I have a little room in his studio with my gear, and Stefano told me: "I'll mix it for you, let's finish it together, I'll record whatever's missing." I was very skeptical, not about Stefano, who's brilliant, but about having to hand my stuff over to someone else, having to explain how I wanted the sound to be... I remember on the first day I hadn't slept a wink the night before, but instead it all went smoothly. This helped me and also freed me up, because I no longer had to think about positioning the microphone for the voice since he would do that, and I could just focus on how I know how to do the vocals, on how I wanted them. In the meantime, I started playing live, last year, and I called in Dominique Vaccaro (J.H. Guraj) and Andrea De Franco (Fera), who started accompanying me. I'd play them these songs and they'd add their own parts. We'd talk about arrangements... When we went to finish the album, half of it was in the Logic projects I already had, onto which we added things. The other half, meaning the more folk-leaning tracks, we recorded live as a trio, with the vocals live, which for me was a first, apart from a few rare exceptions. So what you hear is what we played, tracks like "Had It All", "Black & White", "I Want You" were genuinely live in the studio. Then we overdubbed a few things. So the album gradually took shape this way.

You're making me think of two aspects I've always kept in mind listening over the years to the music you've made with your various projects: eclecticism and a distinctive personal signature. Also, in "Sprecato" I see two pillars: the first is that you wanted to start from folk, a genre you felt was truly yours, choosing to use your own name James Jonathan Clancy; the second is that you have a community behind you supporting you, that there's a group of people behind it...

The name has an important side for me, something I feel, and that's why I added "James". On my ID card my name is "James Jonathan Clancy", but nobody calls me "James", in the sense that for my mother I'm "Jonathan" and everyone calls me that. It was a mistake at the start, when they named me that way. I wanted to add "James" because, even though it might sound like it's just my name, to me it creates a bit of distance from "Jonathan Clancy". I liked the idea of creating a separation. I also chose it because, in my opinion, three-word names evoke a certain kind of sound in the direction I was heading, from country to blues. For that whole world, it fit well.

So paradoxically "James Jonathan Clancy" is more of a persona (a character)?

Yes, it's different. It was strange for me too! My mother asked me: "Why?". So for me it's a form of protection, it's different from "Jonathan". My friends don't call me "James". As for the collaborative side, in the end I love being part of groups. Even His Clancyness started out as a solo project and then became a group where in the end everyone else also contributed 100%. Yes, my name was on it and I brought the songs, but everyone gave an important contribution. I like the idea of a group, and in this case it was a more controlled group, because I thought out the songs the way I wanted, partly together with Stefano in the end, and then we'd bring in friends who could play a particular instrument we weren't able to play ourselves. I'm also lucky because after 20 years of playing, you have a lot of friends. Then there's my label (Maple Death Records). So I'd thought more about the kind of parts to add. For example, there's Andrea Belfi playing drums. I had in mind exactly the kind of drumming and sound of Bert Jansch's drummer, a Scottish guitarist whose drummer, Terry Cox, I'm a fanatic for. Stefano and I asked ourselves who could interpret that kind of drumming in that way, and Andrea came to mind. I sent him the track and he came right away. Then Dom has that sound I love, Andrea (De Franco), who plays synths, carries all that cosmic side that I like...

I find this two-way movement beautiful. At a difficult moment in your life you collaborated with Setola, you were already close to Canicola. There's this question of closeness: even if a project doesn't yet have a concrete form, you talk about it with Stefano and he lends a hand to finish it, even though you'd initially thought of doing it alone... it's a spontaneous movement. As if to say: we know each other so well, we know so well what the important things are, let's all just do this thing together...

Yes, in fact what stays with me from this album are the collaborations... "collaborations" is actually a cold word... it's an album made of bonds of affection and friendship. Everyone who plays on it is a friend, or someone we've spent years with in a sleeping bag on tour or things like that... it's special. Even the band we're out with now, which in the end is Andrea and Dom - who played on the album - and Laura (Agnusdei) on sax, is special because we're four friends out on the road. There's a particular vibe.

At the same time, could you think of it as your most personal album?

Absolutely, 100%. Because there's more of my own direction in it. And it also depends on the type of songs, in the sense that the songs are very open, in the end I could play almost all of them alone with just acoustic guitar and voice, and they're very simple, because they're built on 2-3 chords with a somewhat mantra-like vocal, and this leaves a lot of room for arrangement, for small contributions from others. People always say: "It's the album you like best", and it's definitely the album I feel closest to in terms of what I like most, as a recording, as lyrics... in fact playing it live is challenging, I'm finding it demanding to do because it has so many parts and I like to sing it well... but it's beautiful, and when you finish it you say: "Wow, that's cool."

In particular, what did Stefano Pilia help you with the most?

Stefano and I have known each other since our student band days, then Stefano played bass in Settlefish. I think we've known each other since I was 16 and he was 20, so that's 25 years, there's a great closeness. We also made an album together 15 years ago, under the name Glow Kids, which we left shelved but that we'd actually like to release properly, not on the sly. Stefano helped me with everything. First of all, he's an incredible musician, so the things he played are amazing, like the bass on a slide track... then he mixed it beautifully, and above all he gave that "hi-fi" sound quality I was looking for on the vocals, because it's clear the album has many different sources but the part he recorded is superb.

And what should we expect from the live version with the quartet?

I think we do it in a pretty similar way, because there are four of us but we swap around a lot of instruments. Then Laura is bringing something extra. She didn't play on the record - that was Kyle (Knapp), a Canadian friend of mine - but it's great because Laura, besides nailing the parts that are on the record, has added even more fluidity, especially in the transitions between one piece and the next. It all becomes a single, unified magma - definitely not easy, maybe, but to my taste that's what I like most: I like it when there's a lot of layering but you can still figure out what the core of the song is.

At OndaRock, we've been following your work for many years. On the site we also have an interview with Settlefish, who I saw you play with years ago...

Really?! I have to go check that out...

Yes... how do you feel your musical path has developed since then?

Sometimes I have regrets, in the sense that I'm proud of everything I've done, but at the same time there are always little things I wish I'd done better, talking about recording. Now, maybe because I'm older, more mature in a certain sense, I feel completely in line with what I have in my head. Before, I always felt a bit out of sync, like to say we're close but not 100% there. It's improved over the years - with the last His Clancyness record, for instance, I was really happy. I also feel a bit freer... I'm a fairly ambitious person, but now more with myself than with the outside world - before I was ambitious about the outside world too, in the sense that especially if you play music like I do, but also like the members of this band and the other bands I've played in - people who've done 100 dates a year everywhere - it's tough. It's tough in Italy, because you never make music that can find its own audience. You play a lot abroad, but even abroad it's tough... There are almost more frustrations than satisfactions, and especially when you're younger you get really angry because you think: "Why aren't I on that website?". That's something I've let go of as I've grown, about 8-10 years ago, and it freed me completely, in the sense that in the end I make music but I also do other things. I still play and I know I'll always play, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the only thing that puts food on the table. I found that really liberating. I see a lot of other people struggling with this. I also work for an English label, Fire Records, where there were artists who were obsessed with it. I understand that dissatisfaction in musicians... but for years now I've felt pretty free: if it works out, great, but I'll do it either way.

The very fact that you come from a certain kind of underground experience - playing a lot, playing live a lot, going into the studio basically already ready and recording in as little time as possible, then having started your own label - could that have shifted your focus toward the recorded dimension? Toward recording, and the studio as an instrument...

Absolutely. Having a label, and therefore dealing with so many different types of artists who send you very different recording qualities that are nonetheless perfect for what they're doing, you stop having certain hang-ups after a while. I have to say that even with Settlefish, recording ourselves was always something we did. I have an idea of hi-fi that maybe isn't the same as someone else's. Today we were talking about Fred Neilbook about Sonic Youth that just came out? I'm a massive Sonic Youth fan!

Yes, about their relationship with moving images (music videos, video art, cinema)...

Obviously they're considered a great band, but, in my opinion, sometimes they're also a bit underrated because, beyond the band itself, if I think about all the input they gave me - not just musically but as people, from the interviews to shining a light on another scene, another band, something else... the connections above all. Connections, if you're a nerd like us who goes and checks everything out, are fundamental. It's a band that gave me an enormous amount...

That's exactly what the book tries to reconstruct...

In the end they're music fans, and that comes through. Every time I read an interview with them I feel like going and listening to things I don't know... I remember buying "Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star" (DGC, 1994) on CD in Canada, the first one I got, because MTV was playing the video for "Bull In The Heather". I'd buy Nirvana and then there was this stranger thing... afterwards I got "A Thousand Leaves" (DGC, 1998) on CD, and then I went back through their catalogue.

This brings us to another question: what other cultural experiences helped you grow over time? Which, I imagine, partly led you to start your own label too...

Well, the label was also born out of dissatisfaction with other labels, that's very clear to me. In the past, with my bands we were even on some cool labels, but I never found the closeness I was looking for - with His Clancyness we were on Fat Cat, which is certainly a great label and they were always nice to us, but there was always a bit of coldness. So I got it into my head that if I ever started a label, I'd try to follow the artists as much as possible, much more closely, even trying to understand them. You know, maybe not everyone shows up with the perfect artwork or things like that, so sometimes it's about being at their service and trying to steer them in that direction - something they might not be able to explain in words but that they have in their head... sometimes having a label means being more of a psychologist than anything else! At least with Maple Death, because everyone on the label is a freak. So that's the reason I started the label.

Other cultural experiences... I think a lot has to do with Settlefish, in the sense that right from the start we began playing in punk, hardcore, emo circuits - whatever was going on in those years - and so all our first tours were in squats in Germany and Jugendzentrum, five of us with sleeping bags, eating vegan slop, with a whole kind of religion to follow. And that's how I did things. We always drove the van ourselves... and in the end it's still the same now, literally nothing has changed. And that thing - which is something a lot of people making music today never learned - has always been my way of doing things. So, as a cultural experience, the first years of Settlefish touring, including in the United States where we did these very long, very DIY tours where you'd play a venue one night, the next day an all-ages place that was maybe a veterans' hall set up with two speakers, the next day a record shop, the next day some rich kid's room that he made available, and you always slept at people's houses. That stuff shaped me culturally. And that's how I believe music should be made. In Italy that thing exists, but it's somewhat lacking. I don't even blame anyone for it - the problem is that the market here is also very small, very squeezed. In two seconds you can make beautiful music and be right on the edge, but then it's all TV and other stuff that has nothing to do with that world.

What drives your choices as a producer? Is it the personal artistic bonds that form, is it the spark that comes from listening, or is it the idea of giving back a precise image of contemporary music?

Yes, I don't really have an agenda. I definitely choose things that don't resemble each other and that have a bit of a story beyond just the music, where there's a strong narrative that goes beyond the music itself. I don't know if it's conscious or not, but that's kind of the direction. I think Maple Death's releases have a fairly precise direction. It's true that we're not a genre label, in the sense that we don't only put out darkwave or only post-punk or only folk, so whoever gets to a second layer understands that... Things come to me in a very organic way: often it's friends who by now recommend other friends, it's things I see live... by now a micro-world has formed, because there are a lot of bands that are part of the Rome East scene, there are Canadian bands who all know each other, there's an English scene where everyone knows each other. Everyone forms a community, that's the basic thing I notice about Maple Death. And besides, I always try to put everyone in touch with everyone else. Within the label there's Manu from Holiday INN who's at Fanfulla in Rome, which, in my opinion, is an important venue in Italy for a certain way of living the underground, and he's the first one (who responds) when you propose something to him: he's put on the Canadian Maple Death band, the band from Turin, the band from Brussels... and everyone's a bit like that.

There are a lot of records I like a huge amount that I end up not putting out. For me the choice has to be: 1. I have to like it 110% and 2. I have to feel like getting into the trenches for that record, because then it's hard to promote these records, I do it myself - except for my own record. When there are also strange challenges - I remember the first Krano record, an artist who sang in the Venetian dialect - that whole thing of getting that kind of music to reach a German or an American is an extra challenge that I like, it's an extra motivation.

You make me think of an idea of underground where Sonic Youth come back to mind, the post-SST world... a way of experiencing things where you find common ground in diversity and in a set of values...

Sure, in fact if we think about SST there's Meat Puppets who have nothing to do with Minutemen, who have nothing to do with Sonic Youth, let alone Black Flag. That thing right there is one of the most beautiful things to me. But they all host each other for a show in their respective cities, they know each other, maybe they even collaborate, but they each keep their own identity. That's it, in the releases I look for a strong identity. For me, in a nutshell, I have to be able to explain that record to you - I don't mean the artist - I have to be able to tell you what it is.

I remember we had Theoréme (Maple Death, 2021) and Bono & Burattini (Maple Death, 2023) as Albums of the Month and indeed everything came through immediately, from the artwork to the sound... what do you think today when you open up Maple Death's catalogue and look back?

I'm super fired up! Maple Death has become an obsession for me, in the sense that it definitely doesn't earn me a living financially, but it keeps me alive. I'm very proud of all the releases, they're really like sons and daughters to me. Basically I look at the records and I mostly see the faces of friends... tonight, in fact, I'm playing, but on stage with me there are three other Maple Death artists, so there's a part of the catalogue here with me, and in Turin I know there's SabaSaba, Heart of Snake, Krano but also Movie Star Junkies, who, even though I've never put out anything of theirs, a lot of people have circulated through the label. There's a sense of family and of embracing each other.

Do you feel more in the spirit of having made "Sprecato" and then you'll write new songs and make another record and more songs, like before, or do you feel it'll happen again only when you feel like doing it, without thinking about when that will be?

Actually, I'm thinking about it, because I enjoyed making the record and seeing it through so much that I really don't want to stop. Maybe I've figured out how to build things, the record is like a kind of map for how to proceed... I'm really feeling the urge! I already have a few ideas, and anyway some drafts were left out that I wasn't able to finish because of time constraints, and I'd like to do something in a short time. Then I'd like to document the band live, because I don't know how long it will last, simply because they all have a record coming out - on Maple Death, no less! - so they all have their own paths ahead, and who knows how long the four of us will stay together on stage, I'd like to document it, whether in the studio or live, I'm not sure.

So with "Sprecato" you brought together your typical way of writing with having experimented with new production methods...

Maybe I understood better that things that seemed hard to do were actually natural. And I want to keep going in this direction. I've also changed my outlook a bit. The last His Clancyness record came out in 2016, but I think it was recorded in 2015. Seven years is also "eons". And maybe I'm also more aware now... I don't know.

Ride the wave of great music

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