TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL
Cleary finds strength in Numbers
By CARL WILSON

Thursday, Aug 8, 2002

It's just the sort of lost cause Neil Cleary is always singing about: If fair were fair, the "next big thing" out of the Brooklyn scene would not be a double-barrelled garage band or some synthesizer-flashing fashionista, but this straggly-haired drummer and singer-songwriter originally from Burlington, Vt., with the mellow tone of a James Taylor and the psychological acidity of a young Elvis Costello.

There's a scene in Cleary's song When All of Us Get Famous, for instance, that anybody in their 20s or 30s in the past decade or so would recognize instantly: "I wake up on Jason's couch," the singer drawls, "He says, 'Gotta go, but you can hang out'/ So I hang around and look/ At Jason's stack of comic books/ He's got posters in the living room/ Star Wars and old Sonic Youth/ A four-track and a bass guitar:/ A second-hand green Fender Jaguar . . ."

With those few choice details, you can picture Jason exactly -- glasses, band sweatshirts, overweight, a smudge of a goatee. Line by line, the song rearranges itself into the panels of a graphic novel, divided with thin black borders, by a deadpan artist such as Dan Clowes (Ghost World) or Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve).

But the narrator has begun pacing in his lifestyle cage, wondering how long he can go on scraping together band gigs, drinking every night, working his java-jerk day job. He tells Jason he's thinking of going back to school, doing "all the things I should have done/ back when I was 21." But his buddy won't hear this defeatist line: "He says, 'Man, snap out of it!/ If you could only hear yourself/ 10 or 15 years from now,' " and then comes the chorus, rising mock-gloriously with a trumpet flourish: "When all of us get famous/ This conversation/ Will be much cooler than it is right now."

The melody is at once desultory and truly pretty, and Cleary's delivery is balanced precariously between earnestness and comical contempt, so that the optimism and rue in the story resonate in every musical nuance. Jason sounds just as much heroic as pathetic. Keen as the satire is, the effect is as moving as a fine short story.

Cleary's gifts should be plain when he makes his Canadian solo debut at the Rivoli in Toronto this Saturday night. When I first heard him play When All of Us Get Famous in a brief afternoon set in a Missouri bar, I turned to the person next to me and said, "What an incredible song." He smiled knowingly, familiar with Cleary's regular shows at a dingy New York saloon: "There's plenty more where that came from."

Cleary's recent self-released compact disc, Numbers Add Up, bears that out. It's centred on that same theme, the transition between adolescence and adulthood, of building yourself up, letting yourself down. But it never seems self-pitying and, alternating languorous ballads with barroom country-rock and "the automatic blues," it never gets repetitive.

There's the bitter Teenage Aspirations, in which the guitar-and-organ chord patterns vaguely echo the Sesame Street theme song, but the lyrics bid childhood a cold goodbye. Or there's Girls Who Leave the East for San Francisco, a sweet acoustic-guitar number that sympathizes with how lost its subjects get between the coasts, but skewers their opportunism: "Girls who leave the east for San Francisco/ Call their eastern boyfriends now and then/ Say that they've been thinking maybe they still love them/ Just in case things don't work out, out west."

Cleary's emergence as a Hank Williams for the grad-student set wasn't predictable, but it makes a certain sense. His parents are an ex-Catholic priest and a Unitarian minister who run a small Burlington book shop. What little reputation Cleary himself had until recently was as the dexterous drummer for popular Vermont group the Pants, cohorts of the stultifying but massive jam band, Phish. He went on to drum for indie-pop groups the Essex Green and the Sunshine Fix, and recorded a grab-bag disc of clever indie-rock under the name Stupid Club, using his long-time alias, "Tad Cautious."

His experience stands him well in his new role -- he arranged and produced Numbers Add Up himself, beautifully, with an assist from guitarist Mark Spencer, known for his work with alt-country stalwarts Freedy Johnston, the Blood Oranges and Son Volt's Jay Farrar. Cleary's now on the road with country-rocker Jim Roll.

Yet his move to New York, evidently, was also a scary leap away from the comforts of being a hometown hero: "And everything you do seems to wait for your next move," he sings, "But your next move just ain't comin'/ And all you've got are halves/ Of 16 different plans/ Like it should add up to somethin'/ But somehow, it just doesn't."

For all his trepidations, it's discontent with his glib, callow past that powers the album; what's rare is the combination of musical and verbal fluency with not just a refusal but an attack on all easy solutions.

It's not without flaws: When Cleary slows to a crawl, the softness of his singing risks losing the listener, and almost every song could use trimming. But he is much better than any shortfall of craft. He has that instinct that transmutes the specific into the universal, that reads the inchoate moods of the many, that makes a song ring like a bell. The rest is all luck, time and, as his parents no doubt taught him, a life sentence to the hard labour of keeping faith.

Neil Cleary with Jim Roll and the Silver Hearts, Aug. 10, 8 p.m. at the Rivoli, 332 Queen St. West, 416-596-1908.