Alex Clare delivers the stunning live video for his comeback single 'Why Don't Ya'
WATCH HERE
LISTEN TO ‘WHY DON’T YA’ HERE
After reemerging from a five-year hiatus in recent months to release his long-awaited comeback single ‘Why Don’t Ya’, a record that found support with BBC Sunday Morning Live, NME, BBC Entertainment News, Sky News, WONDERLAND, and The Sunday Times, who described him as "One of the great voices of British blue-eyed soul”, Alex Clare is back once again to offer up the vibrant live video for his latest offering.
Filmed from a cliff in Dragot, Israel, this new stripped-back rendition of ‘Why Don’t Ya’ sees him channel a far warmer and atmospheric intention. While the original was packed with rich and euphoric production, this humbled croon highlights both his soaring vocal performance and the heartfelt lyrics at its core. WATCH HERE
Speaking about the new live clip, Alex said, "It's just always a good day to record in the desert, isn't it? A high place above the lowest place on earth. Who doesn't love a paradox."
When you hear Alex Clare singing ‘Why Don’t Ya’, you wonder why he ever went away. You listen to this startling piece of music – a raw and wracked soul song, timeless in its construction and in the power of Clare’s voice, but given the deftest and most sympathetic digital production – and ponder the madness of a music industry that didn’t fight to keep a talent like this at work.
It’s nine years since Clare had a huge global hit with Too Close, one of those songs so inescapable it seems to define its year – the kind of song you hear in motorway service stations and in cafes and in shops for months on end; the kind that burns itself indelibly into your consciousness – and five since he last released an album of new songs, Tail of Lions. It’s not that he stopped writing music in that time; he wrote plenty. It was just that he wasn’t writing with hits in mind. He was writing snippets of songs, and recording them in his home studio. He was recording what was on his mind, not what he expected the world to want.
“I was writing not for pleasure, but for expression,” he says. “Sometimes it can be quite painful. Performing songs you have written can be painful. A lot of the songs I have written come from a very personal place, and when you perform them it's not a cathartic experience – you just relive the mindset you were in when you created that piece.”
Clare has been writing and recording his new music since Covid swept the world, working with copper-bottomed hit writers such as Jamie Hartman (Rag’n’Bone Man, Celeste, Lewis Capaldi). “During lockdown I really started going hammer and tongs at it,” he says. “I worked on them at home, then when we needed to do more vocals and instruments, we used a little studio near to me. All the backing vocals on these tracks were done in London by a friend of mine, Olu Sodeinde, who organises gospel choirs and vocal arrangements. He would send me back a thousand tracks of backing vocals, and it would give us a few days' work to go through and edit them and put them together.”
But there was something else in Clare’s life that mattered more to him than music: his faith. He had never been an atheist, and his faith had been growing during those major label years, but in 2015 he made the decision to take it seriously, and he moved to Israel to go to yeshiva – a religious college – to learn about the Talmud and Torah within the framework of orthodox Judaism.
It needs to be noted here that Clare is not a zealot, not a proselytiser. He laughs loudly and frequently. He points out that neither his faith nor he are ascetic. He simply had the need many of us feel: to search for meaning. “And I found that within the framework of Judaism, the philosophical and spiritual side of Judaism – a lot of meaning. It started a search, and I kept searching and exploring and digging and delving, and you get deeper and deeper into it. And as long as you find the right mentors and the right frameworks to grow spiritually, it's very rewarding.So it has been a journey. It's not arriving at a destination, it is growing and understanding and figuring out what resonates.” That said, he notes with a giggle, there was an awful lot of studying law and protocols. “It's a legal code that you're learning, which I wish someone had explained to me before I started, because I was expecting it to be much more spiritual.” That makes him laugh at himself, long and loud.
Back in the first decade of this century, Clare was part of a booming London scene. He shared stages with artists as diverse as Florence and the Machine, Magnetic Man and Mumford & Sons, and plenty more who went on to notable careers. He was also infamously Amy Winehouse’s boyfriend (“When I first heard her play me Back to Black when she wrote it, I didn't pick up a guitar for weeks. I was just like, ‘What's the point? I'll never create something like that.’ It was so powerful). He’s no longer part of that London scene; he’s a different person entirely these days. But listen to his new music and you’ll hear that one thing hasn’t changed: Alex Clare is still brilliant.
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