Say Somethin’ isn’t just the evocative title of the new album from legendary Canadian vocalist/songwriter David Clayton-Thomas, it’s also the motivational impetus behind the album, and marching orders for everyone looking to help alleviate the social and political ills that seem to be plaguing all facets of society these days.
Coming out March 20, the topicality of the 10 songs ranges from a wistful, Gospel-inspired ode for former U.S. President Barack Obama, (Dear Mr. Obama) to a satirical evisceration of the man who succeeded him in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, in the song The Circus. There’s a plea for people to wake up and do something on a global scale to help mitigate the impact of climate change on the song The Precipice, an excoriating of the gun lobby on Never Again and a more personal look at life behind bars in both Burwash and The System.
The overtly opinionated and political nature of the songs on Say Somethin’ did not deter Clayton-Thomas’s usual cadre of musical accompanists from laying down some stellar instrumental tracks, most of which were expertly and deftly tailored to suit the lyrical content and tone of the song, making for even more compelling listening experiences. This group includes music industry stalwarts Lou Pomanti, Davide DiRenzo, George Koller and Eric St. Laurent, Clayton-Thomas’ primary co-writer.
“I live in amongst a very artistic community. Most of my friends are intellectuals: they’re artists, they’re writers, they’re filmmakers, they are journalists. When I got together with my musicians and my friends and we started laying out this album, and we started attacking these issues and attacking them very boldly too, we didn’t tiptoe around the issues. We just went right to the heart of the matter, and they were all in agreement with me,” he said, adding that the songs themselves had been in the works for quite a while prior to the recording process.
“For me, writing is not something you do just before you’re going into the studio. Writing is a constant thing. I am writing down little ideas every day. I am sitting here watching the news, I have my laptop in front of me and an idea for something will pop up and I will just make a little note of it. After about a year or so, I had about 25 lyrical sketches, some of them with a rough idea of a melody, some of them the idea for a rhythm. So, I called in four of my band, guys that work with me all the time, and went over all of these 25 different ideas with them and see if any struck a chord. We then winnowed it down and then a theme started to come up. I noticed that the songs we were picking were all songs that say something, and the title of the album just popped up like that. Say Somethin’ became the mantra for the record. Every song on the album had to say something.
“And when you do that, there’s so much to say. Just look at what’s going on in the world today. You have everything with immigration and kids being locked up in cages on the border. You have climate change, with Australia on fire and beaches eroding away in the United States. Its just continual, and the new single, The Circus, is about the continual craziness out there. So, there’s a wealth of material for somebody who wants to write about. And once we chose basically that the world today as our canvass, it all fell together with the guys very quickly.”
Interestingly, the only opposition coming thus far to what some may see as liberal viewpoints and opinions that pervade the tracks came from social media – and not from people complaining, rather it came from one of the actual heavyweight social media platforms themselves.
“My first choice for the first single off the record, and I asked the record company about this, was the song Never Again, which is about gun violence where I say, ‘another bloody day in American, another mass shooting on the news. Well, here’s a little message from Canada, I hope it’s something you can use.’ What is different? Why don’t we have mass shootings every three days up in Canada? Well, everyone’s not walking around with AR-15s. So, we put the song out, my social media gal at the record company put it on Facebook and it was promptly banned. It was forbidden and banned for advertising. We could post it on our website or on our individual social media profiles, but we could not advertise it. And their excuse was that it violated their standards as being too political. To them, it’s too political to suggest that maybe you shouldn’t be killing people,” Clayton-Thomas said, with a chuckle that was more out of incredulity and sense of the absurd.
“Without social media support, in this day and age of streaming and everything else, that’s the bread and butter for the record company. So, they said we should think of another single, because Never Again is not going anywhere. It’s going to get stopped right at the Facebook level. So, we decided to release The Circus, which is actually more political than Never Again. It just doesn’t condemn gun violence; it condemns everybody LOL. There’s been no problem with putting it on Facebook, which is so ironic because it is way more political.”
Clayton-Thomas made his name as the lead vocalist/songwriter for the legendary jazz and blues-infused rock band, Blood, Sweat & Tears in the late 1960s, a time of great social discord, but also a social awakening in areas of the peace movement, civil rights and the budding environmental movement. Songwriters, as they have done for generations, came to the forefront of that cultural shift, and Clayton-Thomas believes the times we are living in now, are as ‘a-changin’’ as they were them. Which means it’s the time when singer/songwriters – and indeed all artists – need to step up and, well, say somethin’.
“The role of the artists is that you’re not there to just jump on board with the status quo, or the current opinion. You’re out there to present a counter-narrative. You’re out there to say to people, ‘think about this. Look at what’s happening and think about it.’ And there’s so much to think about today. So, hence, we wrote this album and, yes, I hope that other artists say something too, because in the long run, it’s often the artists who lead opinion,” he said.
As a raucous, rebellious teenager, Clayton-Thomas had run ins with the law, including a period of incarceration, and credits music with helping him escape the cycle that continues to see young people, primarily young men, turning occasional bouts with lawlessness as restless youths into a dehumanizing lifestyle that rarely sees them get their lives on track. He has written and sung about this issue before, but never really with the boldness and bluntness as he does on The System, the second track on Say Somethin’. It is part of what he sees as another role for artists, and that is to be a voice for the voiceless, the disenfranchised and the discarded.
“There’s an alternative society going on behind bars. The United States and Canada too, have the largest prison populations [per capita] in the world – two countries that are supposed to be the most fee in the West. So, something is obviously broken. I ended up being thrown into reformatories when I was 15, and I am now involved with a wonderful organization called Peace Builders. This is a very effective organization [based in Toronto] that deals with restorative justice. It’s about finishing the concept of shipping 15 year old kids off to reformatories, and instead trying to actually help them by trying to divert them from the prison system,” he explained, the passion for the project and the cause obvious in his voice.
“The numbers are not just staggering, they’re alarming. If a kid goes in at say 16 years old into the reformatory system, he has an 80 per cent chance of spending the rest of his life in and out of the system – 80 per cent! What business or organization would tolerate an 80 per cent failure rate? And yet governments have this 80 per cent failure rate in dealing with youth. Peace Builders, on the other hand, has an almost 90 per cent success rate. Kids who get diverted away from the courts and into the Peace Builders program have less than a 10 per cent chance of ever repeat offending again. So, that’s why I am involved with them. I have been involved with them for many, many years, and we do fundraisers for them every year.
“The song The System was actually written for Peace Builders. I did a concert at Koerner Hall in Toronto last November in which we raised a lot of money for them and a lot of awareness for them, and knowing that I was doing the concert, I wanted to write a song for Peace Builders. So, that’s how The System came about.”
As much anger and concern and frustration led to the creation of most of the songs on the album, Clayton-Thomas is still hopeful for the future.
“I will answer that question with one word. Yes. And I believe we are watching that change happen right now. I believe we are watching all this hate and fear of the last few years start to crumble. And I have always said this, even to my most pessimistic friends, the American people are a good and decent people, so when somebody comes along, just an average guy like [leading Democratic presidential candidate hopeful] Joe Biden, okay so he screws up his lines a few times and stumbles a bit, but just having a good decent guy up there is something I believe the American people are starting to hunger for,” he said.
“And you have someone like Greta Thunberg, who acts more mature and presidential than the actual president. Can you imagine a 16 year old addressing the United Nations, and how terrifying that must have been for her? But she came through like a champ. She was just terrific. And then you have the kids from the Parkland shooting who stood up to confront the gun lobby. They are part of the generation that is going to be voting for the first time this year. And that’s what is going to tip the election.
“I think this whole coronavirus COVID 19 thing has exposed Trump. You can’t bluster and bully your way through that. The virus doesn’t care about your threats. It’s going to hit Republicans, Democrats, rich, poor – you can’t divide people with this virus. This virus is indiscriminate and threatens everybody. And Trump’s whole success has come from dividing people and that whole philosophy is starting to crumble right now under the pressure of this virus.”
To solidify this optimism and instill a more stridently positive, even patriotic note, Say Somethin’ ends with the rousing and uplifting ode to Canada and the Canadian people, entitled God’s Country.
“God’s Country happens to be one of my favourites on the album. I wrote and recorded this song because I am Canadian. I lived in New York for 40 years and never gave up my Canadian passport. I always knew I would return here. I am third generation Canadian and even my daughter who lives in Sacramento, she is a dual citizen and still keeps her Canadian passport. There is just so much that we should be thankful for in this country. It’s such a beautiful place to live, and the more crazy we see going on south of the border, the more you appreciate the kind of stability that we have here,” Clayton-Thomas said.
“Unfortunately, a little bit of it is seeping north of the border. We are so enormously influenced by the U.S., but we have our own identity and its rock solid. There are just certain things that cannot be corrupted. I have been trying to write a song like God’s Country for a while. I actually did write a song called The Evergreens a number of years ago that touched on this a little bit, about what a wonderful country this is, how unique and how lucky we are.”
With the advent of the worldwide COVID 19 pandemic, all current tour dates for artists of all genres are up in the air. For more information on Clayton-Thomas’ possible dates, as well as the album Say Somethin’, visit www.davidclaytonthomas.com.
For more information on Peace Builders, visit http://peacebuilders.ca.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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