Alex Clare picked up the phone in the middle of the French night, somewhere near the Central Massif, having just stepped offstage and sounding far too chipper for someone creeping up on midnight. “We just finished the show,” he said. “Everything’s great.”
The tour was still fresh and just starting to promote Tail of Lions, Clare’s third album and his first in several years. He's hoping to bring it to the States in the fall. “We should be in the U.S. around October,” he told me. “Very exciting.”
The album itself wasn’t exactly built for escapism. “When I was starting to write the album… Trump was just emerging as a nominee, and Brexit was about to be voted on,” Clare said. “It was a very crazy time.” He wasn’t writing from the perspective of “what if the improbable happened?”—he was already sure it would. “The improbable definitely happened,” he said flatly. “And you could feel it coming.”
But even amid the political gloom, Clare wasn’t leaning into despair. “I think you’ll be fine,” he says—literally. That’s the name of the album’s closing track, a soft-spoken message that sounds like it’s trying to talk someone (maybe himself) off the ledge. “I wrote it for people struggling,” he explained. “You’re not gonna be amazing, not everything is gonna work out, but you’ll be okay. You’ve just got to keep going.”
Of course, this is the same album that houses “Love Can Heal,” a gospel-sized lifter of a track that Clare wrote alone on a guitar before it morphed into an electronic beast. “Like every other song,” he said. “It always starts with just me and a guitar.”
Even Too Close, the dubstep-fueled monster that made him famous, started that way.
His rules for songwriting are pretty simple: “Rule one: Make it anthemic. Rule two: Make it something people can sing back to you after hearing it once. That’s how I know it works—if the audience is singing along by the second chorus.”
But if Clare’s songs are built for big stages, the places he writes them are getting smaller and stranger. Tail of Lions was written and recorded—no joke—on a boat. “I was born a minute from the Thames,” he said. “I’ve always loved the water. And my co-producer Chris Hargreaves moved onto a barge three years ago, so we started writing there.”
Turns out you don’t need Abbey Road when you’ve got a USB interface and a strong Wi-Fi signal. “You just need a guitar, a keyboard, and a laptop,” Clare said. “If we needed to track drums or anything bigger, we’d go into a studio. But the boat was enough for writing. It’s its own world.”
He’s not exaggerating. “Even though you’re in the middle of the city, when you’re on the water, it’s like being a thousand miles away. It’s peaceful. You forget you’re in London.”
And yet for all the solitude, the record is no introvert. “Gotta Get Up” is a full-body dancefloor shove. “It was written after being so fed up with negative people,” Clare said. “There are so many naysayers. I just wanted something positive, something that says, ‘Come on. Turn your life around. See the good in something.’”
He’s not talking about delusional optimism, either. This is survival-mode encouragement. That’s the same force behind “Surviving Ain’t Living,” another standout that’s been landing hard on the road. “It’s been going so well live,” he said. “I think because I enjoy playing them so much. You can jump around to them—and that rubs off.”
Clare isn’t naive about what’s going on in the world. He lives in Jerusalem. He was born in London. He’s watched from both sides of the Mediterranean as things have gotten worse. But he’s still betting on some version of hope.
“I’m not a pessimist,” he said. “I’m a realist. And I manage expectations. But I believe in peace and love.”
And if peace and love fail? You’ll be fine.
Listen to the interview above and check out the video to the Stripped Back version of "Open My Eyes" below.
