Featured Artist Interview: The Henry Clay People

By Travis Woods

A smog-clearing blast of L.A. rock ‘n roll at its wild-eyed finest, The Henry Clay People are the rough-edged rope that connects the classic rock sprawl of Neil Young and Tom Petty to the smirking, telecaster’d indie-rock pummel of Pavement and Paul Westerberg, a rope the People themselves slice in half with the crooked rain of Andy Siara’s jagged guitar and big brother Joey’s slanted and enchanted vocals, with the various remaining strands of garage, country rock, and punk falling into (and forming) a distinctive, riff-smudged whorl-print that is entirely Henry Clay.

Having invaded the L.A. music scene two years ago, the band (Andy Siara – guitar, vocals/ Eric Scott – drums/ Noah Green – bass, vocals/ Joey Siara – vocals, guitar), quickly earned a reputation as one of the finest live acts in La La land thanks to the kinetic snarl of their careening (and often hilarious) stage show, one that melded windmilled guitar rock to a boozy and mischievous anarchic streak as the band essentially hosted a two-year, 140-show residency of L.A.

And now, they’re preparing to unleash their alternately blistering and surprising new LP, For Cheap or For Free, upon the world (via Autumn Tone Records) and celebrate it with a release party/concert at Spaceland on Friday, October 3rd. From the thrash-stomped yowl of “Working Part Time” to the manic, punkish stabs of “Andy Sings!” and “Fine Print” to the ramshackle grace of “You Can Be Timeless,” with Free the Henry Clay People not only filter the past forty years of rock music into a modern aesthetic, they become a part of that history, and earn a place there with a freewheeled and charming roar in which every “whoo hoo hoo!” chorus becomes a rallying call for the best of L.A. indie.

Web in Front recently met with Andy, Joey, and Noah to discuss their new record, their views on modern rock music, and not being Bono.

The Interview

Web in Front: Ok, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I’m the great-great-great-great-great grandson of that hateful bastard, Henry Clay…

Joey Siara: We actually get a lot of messages from people, emails and Myspace, about how they’re all descendents from him…

Noah Green: I think my family line goes back to Betsy Ross…

WiF: Wow, we’re really starting this interview with a bang…

Congratulations on the new record, it’s really, really good. One thing I like about it is how cohesive it is in terms of representing the band’s sound—I think some people have a more traditional, “indie” rock band in mind when they think of the Henry Clay People…but this record documents your band’s embracing of a more classic rock sound or aesthetic—it swings from country-rock to punk to Springsteen’d rock ‘n pop, and moves away from that, again, in-quotes, “indie” rock sound. Was this a natural evolution for you, or a much more conscious move—“this is what our band is or should be”?

Joey: Actually, most of the songs on this new record, I had written them for a different band. We had just finished our last full-length (2006’s Blacklist the Kid with the Red Mustache), a record that had our “indie rock” songs on it, so this was going to be an outlet for the newer, different songs, with Jonathan Price and Jillinda Palmer (I Make This Sound), Joe Napolitano (Le Switch), and Wendy Wang (The Sweet Hurt). So I didn’t see them as Henry Clay People songs, they were for the other band. But then I played them for Andy once and he liked them, so I brought them to a Henry Clay practice—stuff like “Something in the Water”—and Noah and Eric were into them…so it became, “ok, these are Henry Clay People songs.”

WiF: Something we’ve spoken about before, as well as just a few moments ago, is how you’re perceived as band. Some people are in the Blacklist camp and view you in more traditional indie rock terms, while others—me included—think that this new album is a much more definitive statement of sound, or sonic purpose, with its eclecticism and wide range of influences. Put it this way: the record sounds like my idea of what the Henry Clay People are, which is a kind of blender of the last thirty years of American rock ‘n roll, and I wanted to know if you felt the same…

Joey: Yeah…But at the same time, since recording this record, I’ve gone back and listened to Blacklist, and I feel like it has all of the same classic rock aspects to it but that we simply weren’t as good at playing them then, and so it comes off as a much more raw album, instead of having a layered production…it was, basically, two guitars, a bass, and drums on everything and that was it…there’s no piano or production effects…

Noah: And I think we worked a bit harder on these songs, in terms of fleshing them out, straightening them out…

Andy Siara: Well, the whole recording experience with For Cheap or for Free was a weird one, because it stretched from October of last year until June of this year… We recorded a full album last fall that included stuff like “Working Part Time,” “Rock and Roll Has Lost Its Teeth,” and “Andy Sings!”, and seven or eight other cuts…and then we got the Echo residency which, while a blessing, kind of screwed the release of the record, because it wasn’t ready and we wanted something to release for the residency. So we released an EP instead (2007’s limited-edition Working Part Time) that had those three tracks I mentioned, plus two more.

From there, we decided that we wanted to record even more songs. We all listen to different styles and types of music, and I think we wanted to bring more of those influences in…

WiF: Seeing as how the new LP captures a bit more of those influences via your own style, it kind of sounds like an all-or-nothing album in some respects—“here is all of the music that we love, from indie to country to punk.”

Joey: What happened was this: Autumn Tone heard the entire record that we recorded at The Ship—

WiF: The one from last fall that you scrapped?

Andy: Well, a lot of those songs made it onto this record—“Working Part Time,” “Andy Sings!,” “Rock and Roll Has Lost its Teeth,” and “Fine Print,” just in different versions…

Noah: That was a much more raw and punk rock record, too…

Joey:—Justin and Scott from Autumn Tone heard it, and they really liked it.

Andy: They said they’d rerelease the EP we did for the residency, or the full LP—whatever we wanted.

Joey: At that point, I began to feel like we had better songs than some of the ones on the EP or the record they had heard, so I asked for a few extra months so we could go back to a studio and record some new ones—stuff like “Something in the Water,” “Living in Debt,” “You Can Be Timeless”—that needed time to be fleshed-out.

After a while I get sick of songs, and at that time I was already bored and sick of about half the songs we had recorded for the record that got scrapped, which was another factor behind recording the new tracks.

WiF: How did Jonathan, Jillinda, and Joe get involved in the record—was it because of the original idea for that side-group, or the need to flesh out the sound?

Joey: It came from that original idea of forming a more classic rock-oriented band. Jonathan and Jillinda, I just asked them to come in and goof around and jam with us at first, to just play around. And, at first, I think Andy was hesitant to have another guitarist in the band, but now he’s got quite the man-crush on Jonathan… [laughs]

Andy: [sighs] I will say I didn’t think that we needed three guitar players…but what he did was add these really great extra elements to certain tracks, songs like “Bulls Through” or “This Ain’t a Scene,” that really helps them and brings his more alt-country style to the music.

Joey: I think what they add to us is that, the four core members of the Henry Clay People, we’re not musicians at all—

Andy: Come on, we’re musicians!

Joey: Well, we don’t know what we’re doing, then—we’re not trained musicians, put it that way… We have ideas for what we want to do, but we can’t really…

Andy: For an example, this is Joey trying to explain a drum part to Eric: [begins pantomiming a wild and flailing drummer] “It should like something like this!”

Joey: [laughs] Yeah, and Jon and Jillinda and Joe, they all know what they’re doing from a technical perspective—they actually write their music out!

Andy: [laughs] We have never once written out any of our music, never written down chords or anything like that…then you look at Jillinda’s keyboard, and it’s got slips of paper with her keyboard lines written all over them…

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Stream “Something In The Water”

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WiF: There’s a lot of songs on the new album that are, I guess you could say, classic Henry Clay—“Working Part Time,” “Andy Sings!”—and yet, some of the strongest tracks on the record are those that somewhat defy what the expectations of a HCP song are: “You Can Be Timeless,” Bulls Through,” “I Was Half Asleep.” Do you feel like this album captures who you are as a band, or what you’re aiming towards? Or do you even have an idea as to what you want the band to be?

Andy: Personally, I don’t have any ideas about what our band is, or is supposed to be, beyond that I just want to have fun while we do it and still sound decent…

Joey: You know, the different records that we’ve done have been definitively us for the time that we recorded them—Blacklist is definitely looser and raw, which you can chalk up to a lack of experience. Since then, we’ve play a lot of shows, which helped us figure out what we were doing, sound-wise. And really, since we started playing the “Working Part Time”/ “Andy Sings!” batch of songs, with a few exceptions we don’t play anything from Blacklist…

Andy: And it’s not that we don’t like those earlier songs—

Joey: We just feel like, if we’re not moving forward and progressing as a band, what’s the point? I don’t understand bands, new and developing bands, that can write a record and then say, “this is it, we’re going to sit on this and promote it for two years…” You know, good for them, but I just can’t understand how you cannot drive yourself to be constantly writing and recording new and better material…

Andy: I’d love to do a new EP!

WiF: Now that the record’s done, how do you feel about it? Is it what you wanted it to be?

Andy: Like I said, I don’t really know what I wanted it to be—but yeah, I’m happy with it.

Noah: I think the test for me is whether or not this is something I’d listen to if it belonged to another band, and it definitely is.

Joey: I’ve heard it too many times…

WiF: No objectivity left?

Joey: Yeah…but I can still say I like it better than anything we’ve ever done before.

WiF: And now for the questions that you are sick of…band history.

Joey, you and Eric have been playing together for several…how did the rest of the band come together?

Joey: Yeah, this is the question everyone asks…

WiF: I know, I know. But we’ve gotta be comprehensive. You can be Dylan-esque if you want and just make up an answer, that you were hobos who met on a train on the way to see Guthrie…

Joey: Let’s see… [long pause]

Andy: Joey and Eric have been playing together in bands for about twelve years now, since high school… Joey, who taught me to play guitar in sixth grade, let me join in around the time he was in college and I was in high school, and that went on for about three years or so…

It was really a joke, too. We were a party band. We wore mustaches and leisure suits and just played parties…It was a lot of fun, but it was really a joke band.

And then I met Noah at school in January of 2006. And, around that time, the bassist for our joke band quit. I was walking with Noah after a class when I got a voicemail from Joey letting me know, so I immediately asked him, “Noah, you wanna play bass with us?” He came over, worked on songs, and gelled with us immediately, and this was about eight months before we recorded Blacklist. So even though we’d been the Henry Clay People for awhile, and played together under a different name for a few years before that, Noah joining was really what we look at as the ‘starting point’ for the band we are now.

WiF: Here’s another one you’re probably sick of: where did the band name come from?

Joey: [affects Dylan accent] I don’t know, man, it just came to me in a dream! [laughs]

Noah: We came up with it out in the desert, doing opium and peyote…

Joey: We basically did what everyone does: we made a list of ridiculous names, and all the really good ones were taken. We were going to be The Berlin Airlift, but that had been taken… let’s see, another finalist was The Elk…

Andy: [laughs] The Elk!

Joey: [laughs] What is it—plural, singular, both? Mysterious!

Finally, the Henry Clay People was a name no one else had yet.

WiF: Blacklist was produced and engineered in Portland and Montreal with some pretty auspicious people (Howard Bilerman [Arcade Fire’s Funeral, British Sea Power’s Do You Like Rock Music] and Colin Stewart [Frog Eyes, Pretty Girls Make Graves], respectively). What was that experience like?

Joey: It was a fun, nerve-wracking—

Noah: And expensive!

Joey:—expensive experience, and we were not ready to do it when we did. But right now, if I got the chance to record with those guys again, I’d totally do it.

Andy: I’m glad we did it, it was a really great experience.

Joey: It taught us a lot about what it means to be a rock band, that there are certain principles that you need to stand on.

WiF: How so?

Joey: Just in that it’s our job to be a live band, not a fancy group of studio musicians… If it’s raw and messy and it works, good. Do it, keep it.

Noah: They really wanted to capture our live set on record…

Joey: Yeah, they wanted us just to be as messy as we are, because a record’s meant to be a document of the band at that time, rather than some self-conscious, premeditated masterpiece.

Noah: Their approach was, “this is not the only record you’ll ever make, don’t try to make a massively definitive statement. Just make a snapshot of who you are right now.”

Joey: Yeah, they kind of gave us the confidence to be exactly what we are, which is a rock ‘n roll band. And I think we somewhat resisted that advice while record Blacklist, but since then that kind of wisdom has really come to resonate with me—any kind of success we have, hopefully, has been because we realize that we’re not after a perfect rock n’ roll record, or perfect sound.

WiF: How do you view that record now, two years later?

Noah: I haven’t heard it in a really long time.

Joey: I was impressed by how nasty it sounded, in a good way.

Andy: I listened to it a few months ago for the first time in a year. [shrugs] It’s good, but some of the songs on there that I had forgotten we’d even written or played…

Joey: I think it’s a good document of a time and place, but that we’re in a very different time and place now.

Andy: I’m glad we did it, and recorded it where we did—some amazing records have been recorded in those studios.

Noah: Yeah, that was great.

Andy: Only part that sucked was that Howard eats your food. [all laugh] In Montreal, Noah was eating spaghetti, and Howard took a fork and shoveled a massive amount to his mouth, and about half of it fell back out of his mouth and onto Noah’s plate.

WiF: What’s the typical life of a Henry Clay song, from initial inception to being played live or recorded?

Joey: I’ll usually show up to practice with about three songs I’ll want us to try, I’ll play them for the band and then get frustrated, because they’ll be sitting there rolling their eyes… I’ll try to explain to Eric or whoever what I think they should play…but I’ve gotten lazier lately, and I trust the band enough to play good stuff that I don’t really do that anymore. Lyrics, most often, are written right before we’re forced to record [laughs].

Noah: And we tend to play them live pretty quickly…

Joey: Yeah, after one or two practices, since we play so often, we’ll try to play the new song live. And it’s typically a trainwreck [laughs]. Usually, the song is still underdeveloped or we aren’t confident enough about playing it yet.

Noah: See, Joey won’t record little demos or make tapes—

Andy: Which I wish he would at least once, so I could study the song and write a good guitar part instead of having Joey say, “play whaaa whhaaaaaa wha wha whaaaaa…”

Joey: That’s not rock ‘n roll, though. We’re not Radiohead.

Andy: I know, that’s why I said we should try it once…

[a series of angry muttering between Andy and Joey takes place, which quickly devolves into face-making and laughter]

WiF: What do you listen to, and how much of that filters into your own music?

Andy: Everything filters! Our filter needs to be changed!

Joey: My favorite local band is probably Le Switch.

Noah: I like Manhattan Murder Mystery a lot.

WiF: They’re really good…

Andy: Downtown/Union, the Parson Red Heads… I mean, that’s why we picked them and Le Switch to play our record release show with us… The Monolators are really good, too.

WiF: Are there certain established artists who you look towards in terms of a career model, or path you’d be interested in taking?

Joey: I think Spoon—take their last five records, they’re all great and different statements and I can listen to any them at any time…

Joey: Every one of their records manages to be accessible and fun and still mean something…

Andy: And they’re one of the few indie rock bands that’s been able to withstand any kind of short-term, flavor-of-the-month hype…

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Stream “Bulls Through”

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WiF: And not everyone backlashes against the second record and forgets about them?

All: Exactly!

Joey: Britt Daniel has a voice and a sensibility based on all of the same classic rock influences everyone else has, but that he comes at them with a really fresh approach, in a very unique way.

WiF: You’ve played close to 140 shows, including four residencies, in the past two years…at one point, I wrote that you were the MVP of L.A. indie rock—

Joey: I don’t know if we’re the MVP… maybe Most Games Played? [laughs]

WiF: There are a lot of bands who take the opposite approach, however—they play a rare amount of shows so that a sense of an event or a mystique cultivates around the shows that they do play, so as to guarantee a packed house. You obviously don’t subscribe to that way of thinking, yet manage to consistently draw great crowds. What are your thoughts on that?

Andy: Recently, we haven’t taken that many shows, but when we first started playing around town two years ago, we took every single show that came to us. We were of the mindset that some people probably wouldn’t come back, but as long as there was one person we could win over each time that we played—and, at the time, we were playing to crowds of maybe 10-20 people—that we had succeeded.

Joey: We’ve been lectured on this before, by a lot of different people. But I feel as if that model of playing only one show per month and just promoting the hell out of it, I don’t know, it puts way too much pressure on that one show, and if you screw it up…

Andy: Exactly. It sucks if you do that and have an off-night. You might not have a good crowd, or there’s a tech problem, you just don’t play your best, and then your screwed because you don’t have a chance to redeem yourself or win people over again until a month or two later… and that’s what will probably happen at our release show on October 3rd! [laughs]

Joey: Well, we had an EP release show at the scene, and we decided to do the big one-month model we’ve been talking about, and nothing worked!

Andy: Joey’s guitar stopped working… it was a terrible first half of a set…

Noah: Also, it’s important to practice being a live band. You can’t do that by just rehearsing in a studio…

Andy: Take Television with Marquee Moon. Before they recorded that album, they played all the time live, everywhere. They knew exactly what to do, how to play it, all of their arrangements… They knew those songs…

Joey: And when they’re producer, Andy Johns, was trying to arrange it in the studio, Television had no need for that—they could play it all perfectly live.

Andy: And then, they didn’t play nearly as much live before they went in to record the follow-up, Adventure, and you can really hear the difference in the songs, in the performances. It’s a good album, but they had lost that live band edge.

Joey: Also, you’re talking about the way bands present themselves, and for a lot of bands, their live show is like a presentation of, like you said, their “mystique.” And, to me, there’s just something about that which isn’t rock ‘n roll. I view rock as a bottom-up, grassroots movement…

Noah: I think it should be unrehearsed, off the cuff…

Joey: What would happen if Bono tripped? Just tripped over a cord onstage and landed right on his face? Rock ‘n roll would never be the same! “Bono isn’t allowed to trip.” That’s just not rock, at least as I want it to be.

WiF: Playing so often really doesn’t seem to hurt your band in terms of crowds or fans…

Joey: Well, if we were a really heady band that always played forty-five minute sets full of songs that are guaranteed to change your life while we stand completely still on stage and shoegaze, people wouldn’t stay for us at all. Look: our songs our fast, around three minutes, it’s fun—

Andy: There’s anywhere from one to eight covers padded in there… [laughs]

Joey:—so that people are usually able to find something in there that they like. We try to make sure that no two shows are the same.

WiF: You’re consistently one of the best live shows in town. If someone goes to a Henry Clay show, it’s a guarantee that they’re going to be hit in the head with Joey’s shoe or cup of beer, or pulled onstage to play his guitar or take part in a percussion line. What are your goals when you step on stage?

Andy: To get off stage. [laughs]

WiF: It doesn’t seem like you get up there with a plan beyond a set list—

Andy: Oh, we usually don’t do that, either. [laughs] We really just wing it.

For me, I hate going to a show, especially when I really am excited about the band, and just feeling bored. I love when I leave smiling, not wanting the show to end…that’s all we try to do, make the shows feel like that.

WiF: How are your livers after a show?

Joey: [laughs] I’m trying to take it easy, lately. I think we need to institute a two-drink limit before our shows from now on…

Andy: I don’t know, I think I can stay proficient on guitar when I’m drunk… Joey can’t, though.

Joey: What?!?

[another series of angry muttering takes place, with Youtube videos of certain inebriated performances being compared]

WiF: There is a real element of a drunken chaos, or at least an audience expectation of it, at most HCP shows. Does that get old?

Joey: Well, if we were like that all the time, and felt that people only came to shows to ‘see what those guys pull tonight,’ then I’d be bummed about it. But our songs, I want them to be important to people, and I think that’s what brings people back. I think our songs translate, we have a good time, and it seems like the audience is having a good time, and that’s what matters to me.

Andy: We never get onstage planning to do anything weird or crazy. It just happens that way.

WiF: My favorite HCP show might be the night you closed for the Mezzanine Owls residency.

All: Everyone says that!

WiF: I think it’s because that show really summed up what you do well live, besides playing great rock ‘n roll songs: there was no sense of barrier between the band and the audience, it was extremely inclusive. Joey jumped into the crowd and played the last half of the set from the floor, Christian from The Transmissions jumped on the back of Andrew from Radars to the Sky and played Joey’s guitar…just like at Sunset Junction, everyone feels as if they are in the band, not just spectators…

Joey: I think calling the band the Henry Clay People was a good idea, having the word ‘People’ in it makes it a little more inclusive…it appeals to the commie in me.

Noah: I don’t think any of us have any ego about being in a band. We don’t think we’re special for being in a rock band. There doesn’t need to be that barrier between band and audience.

WiF: So what comes after the release show? Do you have a tour?

Joey: We’ve got a west coast tour that we’re pretty excited about, running from here up to Seattle and back.

Andy: Yeah, and…

WiF: What?

Andy: Well, I can’t really…

WiF: Can you not talk about it right now?

Andy: Well, we’re going to open a few dates for Arcade Fire.

WiF: Really?!?

Andy: No. [laughs]

Band Favorites

Andy: “This Ain’t a Scene”

I like this a lot—I like the way it moves. I think it’s a good example of our best interplay as a band…a bunch of small, really great individual contributions, like Eric’s drum fills, for example, or the pedal steel, that add up to make the song sound really great.

“Working Part Time”

The way it kicks in…I just love to play this live.

Noah: “Rock and Roll Has Lost Its Teeth”

I love playing this song. It was one of our first songs that we really slowed down the tempo…I think it was the beginning of a new direction for us. It still is fun to play live, it’s not boring.

Joey: “Bulls Through”

It’s solid, it’s another song where everyone has a great contribution, I think. It’s also got a very slacker-y, melodic vibe to it…that quote-unquote “indie rock” aesthetic. If we can write more songs like this, instead of, say, caricatures of songs, we’ll be ok.

Rare Tracks

The Henry Clay People were generous enough to offer Web in Front two rarely-heard tracks: the building, biting melodies of the unreleased “He Carried a Card” (recorded during the For Cheap or For Free sessions), and the gnashing, catchy stomp of “Double Dutch” (from the limited-edition– approximately 100 copies–Working Part Time EP). Enjoy–they rock.

September 29, 2008 | Filed Under Exclusive Features, Featured Artist Interviews 

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