Solitary Thunder

He who travels fastest, travels alone. The old adage isn’t lost on Alec Ounsworth, the unassuming frontman of oddly dubbed indie-scene sensation Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Even when he’s walking among his more extroverted bandmates, there’s a sense of removal—a cool detachment, as if he’s mentally and emotionally on a different plane altogether. The solitary life? “I prefer it, and it’s just always been that way for me,” Ounsworth bluntly assesses, once he’s finally alone in his dressing room. “I’ve always gravitated toward individual people rather than groups of people, and I think you have to keep a certain distance. You don’t have to be everybody’s friend. It’s just… just unnecessary.” s Ounsworth strolled through a busy backstage at a recent CYHSY gig, and then back and forth to the tour bus, the other group members seemed to instinctively respect his aloof demeanor and give him a wide berth. And with his caterpillar-thick eyebrows furrowed in furtively deep thought, the 28-year-old projects a standoffish seriousness that keeps most interlopers at bay. The group was there to play a concert and preview tracks from its upcoming sophomore album, Some Loud Thunder, and to its main songwriter, it was a studious, no-nonsense affair. The fewer distractions, the better.

Naturally, Oundsworth’s idea of heaven is the lone-wolf existence he leads in his native Philadelphia, while the rest of his outfit stays sequestered in Brooklyn. Until recently, he owned two springer spaniels, and he regularly took them for six-mile hikes in the city’s sprawling Valley Green park. “That’s the way a lot of this album shaped up in my head,” he explains. “I would take long walks with my dogs and listen to everything I’d recorded through headphones, and it helped with figuring out structuring the album and piecing together what should be where. And it also sparked certain ideas subconsciously. Although I never sat down to write a song with anybody in particular in mind.”

Chilly urban environs or woodsy warmth—it doesn’t matter. Ounsworth has just always liked to walk, with only his animals and a Discman—not an iPod—for company. It’s how he discovered the subliminal sonic beauty of recent CD purchases like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk— just shambling across his hometown with headphones on. “And I learned pretty fast that I’d have to stay aware. I wouldn’t be paying attention to where I was walking, and I ran into things or sometimes I’d veer off the trail. With Tusk, I nearly sprained my ankle several times. But it was worth it.”

Ounsworth and his fiancée will soon be moving into even more verdant digs, on the outskirts of town. They’re planning on getting another springer; Ounsworth is planning on exploring even more rustic roads less taken. “Because in the woods, if I run into anything, nobody gets to see it—only me,” he chortles. “And I’ve gotta say, there are certain albums by, for example, Brian Eno that you can listen to a thousand times and it’s always the same. But when you pick out new things, it’s always exciting. And for me, most of those moments are out in the woods, on the same little trek. That’s one of the things that I most enjoy about not touring.”

If you understand how much this artist treasures his solitude, you’re halfway to figuring out the quirky, curiously addictive sound of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which feels like old Appalachian murder ballads simultaneously filtered through a folkish Neil Young sensibility and the twisted avant-punk-pop mindset of early Talking Heads. Ounsworth used to work in carpentry—an equally lonesome pursuit. All through the work day, he was composing songs in his head, jotting them down on notepads or humming them into his handy microcassette recorder. At quitting time, he’d (of course) walk home through the woods and work on the music until two or three in the morning, and then he’d hit the hay and start the process all over again when the alarm rang a few hours later. He’s been obsessively composing for over 12 years, he reckons, and to date he’s penned hundreds of numbers—enough for two more CYHSY discs and three records apiece by two other separate projects he’s planning. “I happen to be with this group of people now,” he explains. “But I might happen to be with another group of people later, or I might happen to be doing things by myself. And my approach is the same every time. I know my heroes made their professions as songwriters long before anybody started noticing, like Lou Reed or Arthur Lee. You’re not doing it for anybody but yourself. And I never even considered wanting to have a band, initially—this is just kind of on a whim.”