Clara Engel – "Anubeth's Song" (2017)

Inner world, outer world

All the same to me 

Clara Engel’s 2017 album, Songs for Leonora Carrington, was released by Wist Rec, an independent record label dealing in “handmade” music.  

Leonora Carrington

The album was inspired by a 20th-century surrealist artist and author who was born in England but spent most of her adult life in Mexico.  “Leonora Carrington was not very well known to me at the outset of the project.  I chose her largely because I wanted an excuse to explore her work more in depth,” Clara told me.  “I was particularly drawn to her sculptures and her 1976 novel, The Hearing Trumpet.” 

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Leonora Carrington was born into a wealthy English family.  She met the surrealist artist Max Ernst at a party when she was 20, and the two hit it off – and then some.  Ernst was married, but left his wife tout de suite after meeting Carrington.

The couple set up housekeeping in the south of France.  Life was good until World War II broke out and the Nazis arrested Ernst on the grounds that his art was “degenerate.”

Carrington’s “Portrait of Max Ernst” (1939)

Ernst managed to escape to the United States, leaving the devastated Carrington behind.  She fled from France to Spain, then had a nervous breakdown.  Her parents had her put in an asylum, where doctors put her in restraints and administered powerful psychotropic drugs.  

Carrington eventually escaped from the asylum and made her way to Lisbon, where she entered into a marriage of convenience with the Mexican ambassador, which enabled her to move to Mexico.  

She later married Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian who had worked with famed Spanish Civil War photographer Robert Capa.  The couple had two sons.

Carrington died in 2011, when she was 94.  I’ll tell you more about her life in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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I first heard today’s featured song when I heard Clara Engel perform in Washington, DC, last December.  It’s the final track of the Songs for Leonora Carrington album.

Clara Engel

“Anubeth’s Song” was inspired by one of the characters in Carrington’s novel, The Hearing Trumpet.  According to Clara, 

Anubeth is a very magnificent wolf-headed woman who appears at the end of The Hearing Trumpet, which is a surreal novel with many twists and turns that left a very strong atmospheric impression on me.  While it has humorous and ridiculous elements, it also deals with serious topics such as the destruction of the environment and the failure of patriarchal power structures.  It’s quite a subversive book in its own way.  

“Anubeth’s Song” has a simple structure and doesn’t utilize a lot of musical tricks, but it manages to cast a spell nonetheless.  Clara Engel has learned that speaking softly is sometimes the best way to get people to listen to you.  

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In 2016, Beyoncé was the highest-paid musician in the world.  But only about 10% of her income came from the sale and streaming of her music.  The remaining 90% came from touring, merchandising, and endorsements.

If you’re an independent musician, you’re not selling out 20,000-seat arenas at $100-plus per ticket.  So how do you make money?  

Not from streaming.  Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are great for consumers, who pay only a few bucks a month for an almost infinite supply of music.  But when you divide that money up among the thousands of musicians who are supplying that music, there’s not a lot to go around.

Musicians like Clara Engel have to scramble to make enough from their music to support themselves.  Some of them turn to crowdfunding websites like Ulele to raise money for new albums.  Click here and you’ll be taken to Clara’s Ulele page, where Clara is hoping to raise $1500 to fund the production of a pressed CD of the forthcoming album, Where a City Once Drowned.  

Clara’s very close to attaining that goal, so I’d suggest you visit Clara’s Patreon page instead.

 Patreon is a website that allows musicians, artists, writers, and other creative types to provide exclusive  content to their followers – or “patrons.”

A drawing from Clara’s Patreon webpage 

You can become a patron of Clara Engel, have access to exclusive blog posts, and have the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping to support her music and art for only $1 per month. If you spring for $7 a month, you will also receive a copy of each new album that Clara releases.  Just click here and you’ll be taken to Clara’s Patreon page.

If you’re afraid of commitment, I understand – believe you me, I’ve been there.  In that case, just click here to be taken to Clara’s Bandcamp site, where you can download Clara’s digital albums for just a few bucks each.

By the way, Bandcamp allows you to stream Clara’s music without paying.  I don’t mind if you dip your toe into the waters of Clara Engel’s music for free from time to time.  BUT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, LET’S NOT ABUSE THAT PRIVILEGE!

Click here to listen to “Anubeth’s Song” and the rest of Songs for Leonora Carrington.

Clara Engel – "It Becomes You to Vanish" (2018)

You melt in my mind 

It becomes you to vanish 

It’s been exactly eight years ago since I wrote about Clara Engel’s 2009 song, “Madagascar” – a song that I found extraordinary then and still find extraordinary today.  (You can click here to read what I had to say about that song.)

I shouldn’t have waited eight years to feature another of Clara’s songs on 2 or 3 lines, but that’s water over the dam – or water under the bridge, if you prefer.  Or both.

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Since releasing the Secret Beasts album (which includes “Madagascar”) in 2009, Clara has released over a dozen digital albums and EPs containing roughly a hundred songs.  If you’d like to stream or download any of those songs, just click here and you’ll be taken to Clara’s Bandcamp website.

Clara is about to release a new album titled Where a City Once Drowned, and would like to release that album on a pressed CD as well as in digital form.  If you'd like to contribute to that effort, just click here and you'll be taken to Clara’s Ulele.com crowdfunding page.  (You can contribute as little or as much as you want.)

Here is the cover Clara created for Where a City Once Drowned:

You’ll see some of Clara’s other album covers below.

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Clara’s most recent release is the five-song A Shore Far From Any Prison, which includes today’s featured song, “It Becomes You to Vanish.”

I heard Clara perform that song live earlier this year in Washington, DC, one of the stops on their recent “microtour” of the northeastern U.S., which also included stops in New Haven, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.  

Clara Engel performing in Washington, DC

[Note: I used “their” instead of “her” in the previous sentence.  That’s not because I don’t know the difference between singular and plural pronouns, but because Clara prefers gender-neutral pronouns.  It’s unnatural for me to use “they” as a singular pronoun, but I’m happy to accommodate Clara’s preference.  As far as I’m concerned, politeness takes priority over grammatical punctilios.)

You can click here to view a short documentary about Clara’s tour, which was recorded by tour manager Ander Swift.

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After the tour was over and Clara was back home in Toronto, I spoke to them about A Shore Far From Any Prison in general and today’s featured song in particular.

As you’ll see, I tried to pin Clara down as to the meaning of some of that song’s lyrics, but I failed.  

Clara refuses to assign a specific “correct” meaning to their lyrics.  “I’m drawn to ambiguity and mystery,” they told me.  “I like for people to find their own way into my songs.”

Given that, it’s not surprising that the following quote from the novelist Siri Hustvedt appears on Clara’s website:

That feeling of nearness to the shapeless ghost, ambiguity, is what I want most, what I want to put inside a book, what I want the reader to sense.  And because it is at once a thing and a no-thing, the reader will have to find it, not only in what I have written, but also in what I have not written.

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2 or 3 lines: Clara, welcome back to 2 or 3 lines.  I enjoyed seeing your first performance ever in  Washington, DC and I’m glad we had the chance to sit down and talk after that performance.

Clara Engel: It was great to meet you in person as well.  Thank you for coming out to my show and for giving me and Ander a bit of a tour of Washington.  I hope to be back in DC soon.

2 or 3 lines: The title of your new album is A Shore Far From Any Prison.  That’s also the name of one of the songs on the album.  How did you come up with that title?  Is it a quote? 

Clara: I can’t remember exactly where the title came from.  I’m always writing down little phrases that come to me – sometimes partially overheard conversations, or a fragment of something I’m reading.  There was a moment when I had a fear that I’d unconsciously copied it, so I did some searching – but I couldn’t find it anywhere.  

2 or 3 lines: Does the title have a particular significance or meaning?

Clara: A shore is a place where the boundaries are in constant flux, and water itself changes state and temperament all the time.  Also, a shore is a dangerous place that won’t submit to human authority – it almost exists in a different realm from a prison.  It doesn’t bend to systems of human control and brutality, and it has a much more elemental and dispassionate power.  It doesn’t care who you are or what your social status is.  It’s also where we ultimately came from – where our first ancestors crawled out of the sea.   Those are my thoughts about the the significance of the title today – they may change in the future. 

2 or 3 lines:  The album is dedicated to Nicholas Kenji Field.

Clara: Nick is my partner.  We went through hell together in the last year and a half: we both unexpectedly lost our fathers to cancer, within six months of each other, and we also lost several good friends.  It felt like every time we would regain our equilibrium a little bit, another disaster would strike.  These songs were written during that time period of so much loss, and it felt loving and in a way life-affirming to dedicate the album to him. 

2 or 3 lines:  There’s an old Dan Hicks song called “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?”  Today’s featured song – “It Becomes You to Vanish” – seems to me to be expressing a similar sentiment, although it uses language that’s not as blunt.  Is the singer in your song essentially telling the other person that they finds them the most attractive when they are absent?  That absence makes their heart grow fonder?  

Clara: That’s one interpretation, but I like my songs to be open to different interpretations – I don’t like to assign a specific “correct” meaning.  I work intuitively and try to let imagery reveal itself to me.  I’m drawn to ambiguity and mystery.  This particular song, for some reason, makes me think of Haruki Murakami’s novels – people are often disappearing in those novels, and there’s a strong magical realism element.  It’s not a missive directed at a particular individual – I don’t tend to write songs directed at individual people – and has a more melancholy and a standing-outside-of-the-world sensation about it than any sort of romantic love or passion.  I would say that song, for me, has more to do with mortality and finitude, and how we can feel hemmed in by the trappings of our identities.  

2 or 3 lines:  The following lines from the song – “As hammers strike the cold clay/You crumble to dust/I blow you away” – made me picture the singer performing a ritual to purge their mind or heart of someone.  Instead of sticking a needle into a doll, the singer takes a clay figure of someone, hammers it until all that is left are small dust particles, and then blows those particles away so there is essentially nothing left.  Is that the idea behind those lines – purging the memory of someone from one’s mind?

Clara: That’s an interesting interpretation and I don’t want to say the song is not about that . . . but it wasn’t my conscious intention.  Of course, I think our conscious intentions play a much smaller role that we’d like to believe.  So the song could be about that on some level.  Or it could be about the impossibility of holding onto any person or memory, or even a static sense of one’s own self.  If the song’s narrator isn’t wielding the hammer, is more of an observer, it becomes more of a lament for our lives, forms, and entanglements than any sort of vindictive spell.  I do know it wasn’t me wielding the hammer – I was reflecting more on changes of state.  There’s dust, clay, a burning shoreline, stone, bones in that song.  We all come into being and then fall away.  Our brains can’t even fathom the state of not being, but it stretches out behind and ahead of us in an unfathomable expanse.

2 or 3 lines:  “It Becomes You to Vanish” incorporates a short sample from the song “Mille Cherubini in coro” by Franz Schubert, which is a lullaby to a dead child who is being rocked by his mother.  Did you choose to include that sample because of its subject matter, or simply because you liked the sound of the music?

Clara: That song is on a collection that I picked up in a used CD store a long time ago.  I chose it because I love the melody of that particular piece, and because I wanted to incorporate something from another time and place into my song.  I actually didn’t know what the lyrics of the song were about, but that adds an additional layer to my song, I suppose. 

2 or 3 lines: How would you characterize the guitar accompaniment on this song?  It reminded me a little of the sound of Chris Isaak’s guitar on “Wicked Game.”  

Clara:  My accompaniment is a cyclical pattern that is quite delicate and depends on me not forcing or pushing the tempo at all.  I love the song “Wicked Game” – I recently re-watched Wild at Heart, which is probably why I like that song so much.  I think it’s the way that I’m sliding my fingers audibly down the neck of the guitar on one of the chords that made you draw that comparison.  

[Note: Wild at Heart is a 1990 movie directed by David Lynch and starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern that features “Wicked Game” on its soundtrack.]

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The next 2 or 3 lines will feature another Clara Engel song.  

In the meantime, please visit Clara’s ulele.com page and help make the Where a City Once Drowned CD a reality.

Click here to listen to “It Becomes You to Vanish” and the other songs on A Shore Far From Any Prison.