Sitting In Nature with ClothesLine From Hell
We caught up with multi-instrumentalist, Adam LaFramboise, aka Clothesline From Hell, to talk about his upcoming EP, “Soon We’ll All Be Smoking”
Clothesline From Hell and Sierra Madison
SIERRA MADISON: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself?
CLOTHESLINE FROM HELL (CFH): Yeah. My name is Adam. Adam from Hell. Clothesline From Hell. I'm a musician. I like to say that I am a band. I don't really think of it as solo stuff, but I'm the only permanent member. I work with a lot of great people. I've played in lots of bands. And yeah, I don't know. Yeah. There we go.
SIERRA MADISON: Where did the name Clothesline From Hell come from? Did you have a bad experience with a clothesline once?
CFH: Oh, no. And that's part of the fun of it, is that what it actually is something kind of banal, but it does have this kind of nightmare thing to it. There's an image that I guess comes if you think about the name visually. But no, it's actually a wrestling move. It's like if you clothesline someone with your arm. And I'm actually not the wrestling aficionado; it's my best friend who is. I remember when I started this band, I asked my friend, "Can you just give me a list of wrestling terminology and moves and stuff like that?" And I'll just pull names for songs or whatever. That one stood out. But I don't know whose move it is; it's someone's finisher, someone's iconic move. I want to say it's something Bradshaw. It's really embarrassing because every time I play with a band-- there's a lot of overlap between punk dudes that play in bands who also love the WWE: people get really stoked and want to come talk to me about wrestling, but I know next to nothing about it.
SIERRA MADISON: Fake fan.
CFH: Yeah, I am a fake fan. The wrestling thing is interesting to me, though, because there are levels of reality to it. There's this dichotomy between performance and character, and then something a little more personal. People are fans of the narrative, but they're also fans of John Cena or whoever. Early on, I thought there was something there that related to writing songs. You're trying to express yourself in a specific way. There is aesthetics to it.
SIERRA MADISON: Like a persona almost.
CFH: A persona, or just the prettiest or coolest way to say it. I like blending low-culture stuff with higher-culture stuff, which is nothing unique to what I'm doing. I started this in 2018, and as it has gone on, it's less and less unique. There are a lot of nu metal aesthetics, tap-out t-shirts, and Monster Energy stickers. It seems less radical now, but at the time, coming out of authentic indie rock scenes, I thought it would be fun to do something drawing from a different era and sensibility.
Press photo of Clothesline From Hell shot by Lauren Armstrong
SIERRA MADISON: Your debut EP "Soon We'll All Be Smoking" draws from a diverse range of influences, including the post-grunge aesthetics of Nu Metal and the break beats that historically drove classic hip-hop and Detroit House. Can you share how you blended these elements to create a cohesive sound? Because in theory, when you think about them, they don't seem like they would all work together to make good music.
CFH: Yeah. It's interesting for me because I don't think about music that much, so when I'm answering a question about how it happened, I'm probably making something up. The easiest answer is that I wanted to incorporate all the things I like without sounding like one specifically. I didn't see why taking a drum break and putting a bunch of sub-bass on something like classic New York Boom Bap couldn't be blended with a singer-songwriter, vocal-driven, melodic acoustic guitar song. I didn't see why those things couldn't match. And there are people that do it. I'm not the only person who does it, but I'd like to think that I'm the only person who does it exactly as I do. You can see someone else blend certain things and think, "I have the potential to genre mash like that," but maybe it's different pieces of the genre.
For me, was just kind of natural. When I first started making music, I was listening to a lot of lo-fi four-track recordings. Elliott Smith was probably the most famous of those, but it ranged from very outsider unknown musicians. That was part of the appeal; I felt like I could do it. If you set out wanting to be Kurt Cobain, there's a lot of room for failure. I worked with tape a lot at first and bought multiple four-tracks and single-track tapes, but pretty soon it felt more authentic to just do it on my phone. That's how I do all the guitars and vocals, just on my phone.
I was doing that for a long time and then found myself listening to different music. I wanted to take this [hand gestures] from Björk and Massive Attack and the Bristol Sound and then take that [hand gestures] from House Music. I don't want to say I'm taking Detroit House; I'm taking so much [from different genres] and for very specific parts of it. It just came together naturally. Working with Matt Tavares, who was in the band BadBadNotGood and wrote songs for Post Malone and made hip-hop beats, it felt natural when I did the first track with him, which was "Open Up," to blend some of his sensibilities with mine as well. So yeah, it's just a big mismatch.
SIERRA MADISON: My personal favourite track from the EP is "Open Up." Could you talk a little bit about the inspiration and what making that one was like?
CFH: Yeah. I think that song, probably came together fast in terms of the lyrics and melodies. Other than maybe the bridge, which Matt actually might have just sent me home to write because it needed a bridge, the rest just kind of came out at once. I wasn't thinking too much about it. I actually do have a funny story about writing it though. I was in a Zoom class, a grad seminar, which you didn't get a mark in, it was just pass or fail. You just had to show up. My camera and mic were off, and I was playing the guitar and recording things into GarageBand and looping them while people were talking about movies or whatever in the background. It was all pretty unconscious, which is normally how the best ideas start for me. Often if I'm sick, I'll have [recorded] a bunch of riffs because my brain isn't being super critical. I did that [writing the lyrics to “Open Up”] passively and then probably left it for a little bit and wrote the rest.
I wrote it in 2021, so middle of the pandemic. I think there was a little bit of wanting to connect with other people. That's where it came from, the idea of not only wanting to spill your guts but also wanting to hear everyone else do that. It felt like there was a bit of a disconnect between people at that time. It sounds like a love song, which is always nice when you're writing something that has the potential to work in a romantic context because everyone can relate to that.
“ It’s interesting for me because I don’t think about music that much, so when I’m answering a question about how it happened, I’m probably making something up. The easiest answer is that I wanted to incorporate all the things I like without sounding like one specifically. I didn’t see why taking a drum break and putting a bunch of sub-bass on something like classic New York Boom Bap couldn’t be blended with a singer-songwriter, vocal-driven, melodic acoustic guitar song. I didn’t see why those things couldn’t match.”
SIERRA MADISON: Did you mean for it to be a love song, or did it just happen?
CFH: Not really, no. I think that I've written a few love songs and didn't find they made the best songs a lot of the time. If they were a love song, there would be something else involved. There's an old song of mine that a lot of people interpreted as wanting to get married and have a family, but so much of it was about the pandemic and not living in the city.
If I write a love song, it's very specific or there's a twist. The words "I love you" don't flow out of me easily. Maybe that's partly because the music doesn't call for it often. There might be an edge to it that suits talking about different things better. Sometimes when you're outright saying "I love you," you want to infer a little bit. You want people to be able to infer it. But then again, I love The 1975, and their last record is full of "I love you"s, but yeah it's really cool if you hold it back. There's a Smashing Pumpkins song that ends with him saying "I'm in love with you" over and over. After an album that tackles a lot of other topics, it's amazing when someone lets out that vulnerable, really simple thing.
Press photo of Clothesline From Hell shot by Lauren Armstrong
SIERRA MADISON: You've said that you want to take the radical honesty of lo-fi acoustic music and cross it with the ugly, sometimes funny extremities of WWE, even though we know you're a fake fan now. While I was listening to the EP, I found that the flow of the lyrics resonated with a lot of poetry, particularly Charles Bukowski's style of free verse and declarative sentences. I found that it is really similar to your structure of lyricism, especially in “The Way It Goes” and "Open Up." Could you talk a little bit about your approach to songwriting and how you balance personal vulnerability with more playful elements?
CFH: I think that personal vulnerability just comes naturally. It's more about not thinking too much about what you're saying. Both those things come out simultaneously, where it's maybe not funny, but a little odd. If I were to look at the lyrics to those two songs, there are lines in there that I probably don't even know what they mean. They're more just an image or a saying. Sometimes you're playing an instrument and singing a melody, and you just let out vowels. Then you get attached to those vowels and look for words that sound like them because you think it has to be something specific. It's funny trying to find a line that makes any sense that fits in there. But those songs are about pretty specific things.
I'm not the type to revise lyrics or go back to them much. I don't think I've ever sat down and written a song lyrically for more than 15 minutes. When I try to find lyrics, I have to go back in my notes app, and it's like, "Oh, I haven't edited it in six months." If you express yourself honestly, it probably will come out in this funny, imperfect, weird way rather than a perfectly articulated way. I associate seriousness with that perfect articulation and something being funny with it being said more crudely.
SIERRA MADISON: That's kind of why I thought it resembled poetry. It feels very authentic like it's just flowing out of you. When I was listening, I felt like you wrote it and then left it. It didn't feel like something where songwriters sit for hours getting the perfect way to describe a feeling.
CFH: That's cool too. I'd like to do that sometimes. I think it would be interesting to scrutinize every line the way I scrutinize the melodies, which I refine and change a lot. I was thinking about something a friend said to me. He knows me well and knows what I'm talking about in my music. Before, I felt like there was a rule to never use a fake name. Some people write a song with a random woman's name, and I was always like, "I'm going to use real names." Now I regret that because, you know, relationships change, and now there's no ambiguity about what I'm talking about. But, my friend said, "You talk about this for half the song, then start talking about something wildly different." Some of that is piecing together songs where an idea goes nowhere. You want there to be a second section, so you Frankenstein that part from a completely different song because you like these two parts. When you do that, you end up with songs that are about ten different things. People interpret things so much. I'm someone who doesn't listen to lyrics closely; I'm more interested in the arrangement and melody. As long as they sound good when they're sung, then it's cool.
SIERRA MADISON: I always think it's interesting when people listen more to the melodies than the lyrics because I tend to be more interested in the lyrics unless I'm high, then I'm so into the music.
CFH: Are you a musician?
SIERRA MADISON: No, I'm a poet/writer. But yeah, I think it is more common for people who don't play an instrument to just listen to the lyrics.
CFH: I have lots of friends who have told me they don't really hear individual instruments. It's just kind of a song with a vocal on top, which is interesting. Sometimes, when I listen to these things before we put them out or finalize versions, I'll try to do that—just listen to the vocal. If you're refining the drums for so long, you'll end up just listening to the drums. In some of these songs, I'm listening to just the drums and how they're mixed, and I have to force myself to stop doing that and just listen to the vocals because that's what most people hear. Then I often like the song a lot more because it's easier to get a good vocal take than to get everything in the mix sounding perfect. So... maybe I should worry about it.
SIERRA MADISON: Honestly, I feel like in the last two years, from working in music, I hear the different instruments. I only ever played the tenor saxophone, so I can recognize when someone is getting funky on the sax in a song.
In my humble opinion, I feel like we're at a pivotal point in the music industry and culture in general, where it feels like everything's been done before or it can be difficult to make your own unique sound. You captured it perfectly when you said, "I feel like the only way to keep making new music is to be influenced by nothing but inspired by everything that has ever changed culture." Could you speak a little bit on that and what you meant, it captures the intersection of the state of music and culture right now.
CFH: I think I heard that distinction between the two in a book about Nirvana. They were talking about how it has inspired more things and directly influenced nothing. Nothing sounds exactly like it, but you can hear pieces of it. I listen to this podcast, Bandsplain, where they go through the history of bands. When I listen to that, you'll hear about how bands like Pavement or Wilco or Soundgarden or something like that—you'll hear about how their favourite band growing up was Kiss, which inspired them to make music. Speaking from my point of view, Kiss is not music that I'm interested in at all, so, amazingly, so many people I like were interested in it. Back then, there was limited access to different types of musicians and albums.
Kiss is outrageous and grabs the attention of a 10-year-old. You can be inspired to be a musician and change what you're doing slightly without being influenced by it sonically. At a certain point, if you're trying to jack someone else's sound sonically, you often fail. Either you'll fail and sound like the dollar store version of them, or you'll fail and invent something completely different. At a certain point, I'd failed enough that I thought, "Why try to sound like another band?" I used to be in bands that were modelled after another band we wanted to sound exactly like. Even if you're successful, you're not original. This isn't me.
I don't think we're lacking new sounds. People worry about the commercial appeal of stuff. For example, when I first heard Billie Eilish, it wasn't my favourite thing, but I'd never heard vocals like hers. Very quickly, I realized she probably listened to ASMR videos to go to sleep, and that's how she does these ten-track whisper-quiet vocals that sound right in your ear. What's happening that excites me is that a lot of trends are dying. We're saying there's no original music because, as a listener, you're getting sick of hearing the same thing over and over. Hopefully, people will feel less pressure to sound like a specific artist and feel more freedom to sound like themselves. If you try to sound like yourself, people are individuals, and it's about getting out of your head about what you want to sound like.
For me, I make stuff I like, but more importantly, I just make what I make. I'm sometimes surprised that other people like it because it seems so specific to me. It's a great situation to be in when you're just letting it flow, and other people seem to like it. For me, that's never needed to be a million people; it's just needed to be my friends. The one that happens a lot is other bands like your stuff, which is great because you respect their opinion. The first thing that happened for me was connecting with other bands online who sound so different but have something in common because they want to hear each other's music and get inspired by it, not influenced by it.
SIERRA MADISON: It's like that cliche way of saying you have to be yourself to find your tribe.
CHL: It's true. It's cliche to say, but no one can do what you're going to do because you'll say it or produce it in a way that's authentic and unique to you and your experiences and your perception of music or songwriting.
Cover art for “Soon We’ll All Be Smoking” via 444%
SIERRA MADISON: Last but not least, what can we expect from you next? I know you have an EP coming out soon!
CFH: Yeah, the EP “Soon We’ll All Be Smoking” comes out July 26th. There are two singles coming out before that. Part of my plan is to keep putting out music in short form until an album feels ready. There are already singles ready to go; they'll come soon after.
Listen to the first single off the new EP now, “Open Up”.
Keep up Clothesline From Hell on Instagram and stream “Soon We’ll All Be Smoking” on July 26th!