CLUTCH Frontman Talks About Songwriting Process For Next Album

Greg Prato of UGO.com recently conducted an interview with vocalist Neil Fallon of Maryland-based rockers CLUTCH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

UGO.com: After many years, CLUTCH has finally issued a live DVD. How did it come about?

Neil Fallon: We've been talking about making a DVD for ages. We don't like video cameras — if we get right down to it — so it was an uphill battle to get it together. We met Agent Ogden, who works closely with Les Claypool, and we hit it off. He came out and got a crew together for a couple of shows, and just compiled a "best of" performances. We recorded the live CD simultaneously with the DVD — it's just sort of an ‘audio version' of it, if you will.

UGO.com: How did you decide which tracks would be on the DVD, and which would be on the CD?

Neil Fallon: We didn't want to have an exact reproduction. With us, sometimes there were good performances audio-wise, that maybe there was a "hiccup" video-wise — so it couldn't fit both categories. So that was one of the reasons. I think we didn't put "Big News I & II" on because we had that on a live CD in the past [actually several live CLUTCH releases have featured this track — 2002's "Live at the Googolplex", 2004's "Live in Flint", and 2008's "Heard It All Before: Live at the Hi Fi Bar"].

UGO.com: What is CLUTCH currently up to? Is there a new studio album on the horizon?

Neil Fallon: We're knee deep in writing the next BAKERTON GROUP record, which is a side project that we do. We're going to go out on tour in about two weeks, and then starting in October, we're going to record that here in Baltimore with J. Robbins [producer and former JAWBOX singer/guitarist]. Jean-Paul, Dan, and Tim are all very proficient musicians — I'm not nearly as good as a player as those guys. I'm doing my damndest to become one, but I have to play a lot of make up. So they have a lot of ideas that wouldn't maybe necessarily fit under the umbrella of what CLUTCH does — not that we ever really defined what that is. Put it this way — for every one riff that makes a CLUTCH record, there's 20 that ends up in the trashcan. So this was just a way to recycle some of those ideas, and approach them in maybe a more "liquid" way, and not put it so much in the "verse, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, chorus" formula or what have you. We have yet to come up with [an album title]. And then as soon as we're done with that, we're going to roll our sleeves up with writing the next CLUTCH record.

Read the entire interview from UGO.com.