Alex Clare unveils the euphoric new single 'The Same', out March 18th
LISTEN TO ‘THE SAME’ HERE
After reemerging from a five-year hiatus last year to release his long-awaited comeback single ‘Why Don’t Ya’, which 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 kicks off his 2022 to unveil the euphoric new offering ‘The Same’.
Reestablishing himself as a bold and soaring name on the new music circuit, ‘The Same’ looks to continue his unstoppable reputation as he delivers another rousing and captivating new offering. With its soaring production providing the perfect backdrop to Clare’s own instantly distinguishable voice, his return has now been given another heady dose of glittering alt-pop power.
Speaking about the new release, he said, "I wrote the song with an old friend who I hadn't seen since we were at school. It got me thinking about how we change over the years but parts of ourselves we may not like, still affect our present ''.
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.”
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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