Cooking Up The Good Stuff

The scent of baked apples can sure inspire more than just a rumble in your belly. At least it can if you’re Clare Manchon. The Berklee College of Music-educated chanteuse, and namesake of chamber pop group Clare and the Reasons, often found herself penning tunes for her band’s sophomore effort, Arrow, while cooking away in the Brooklyn, N.Y. apartment she shares with husband, and main Reason, Olivier. 
“It’s unconventional, and I think when I’m writing I like to be slightly distracted by the right things. Not by the phone or the computer,” she explains via telephone from her home. “I like ‘Oh! It’s burning!’ and then my brain clicks or I have a new idea.”
Although it isn’t difficult to picture the adorable Manchon as a bona fide Betty Crocker, she’s not exactly a woman-out-of-time, as she has often been depicted. Sure, she admits to loving the “olden days,” but, in her words, she loves Grizzly Bear “as much as the next gal.” A persona misconstrued, albeit with the best intentions, from the cover artwork for the band’s proper 2007 debut The Movie, the vision was only accentuated, and pulled into the band’s music, by Manchon’s old-soul vocals.
“I think the reason that people hear [our music] as nostalgia is my voice,” she says. “Maybe I was alive in the ’30s and I got hit by a train or something and then I came back? I don’t know.”
But, besides vocals, Manchon insists her band’s music is purposefully based in modernity. Alongside fellow current-decade chamber pop tunesmiths Sufjan Stevens, Antony and the Johnsons, Final Fantasy and the aforementioned Grizzly Bear, Clare and the Reasons mixes the catchiness of traditional pop with extra layered instrumentation akin to the sounds of ’60s and ’70s pop acts like The Beach Boys and Harry Nilsson, yet adding its own modern twist. Especially in a live setting, it’s not unusual to find the band incorporating kazoos, saws, baby kotos, recorders and even a Rubik’s cube into its sound.
“I try to think musically modern. I don’t try to do throwback music. I think if I was trying to do throwback music, you would really notice it,” she says, adding that her lyrics often come from a present-day point of view. “I’m definitely drawing most of my stories and characters from current day happenings, for sure.”
In order to capture the group’s large, orchestral sound on its independent band budget, for Arrow, Clare and the Reasons built a recording tent — yes, tent — in the guest bedroom of friend, neighbor and engineer Alex Venguer. Seventy percent of the album was tracked in the home studio, with the band members sometimes running across the street in their pajamas to record, while all the strings, horns and pianos were recorded at Legacy studios in Midtown Manhattan.
“Those are instruments in my opinion that cannot be done in an imperfect environment,” explains Manchon. “I think you kind of learn where you have to spend your budget and where you can cut corners. If you want to have strings, especially, you can’t cut corners.”
Still touring for its first record until earlier this year, Arrow was written and recorded during the band’s sparse time off from the road. With a schedule to meet, recording Arrow presented whole new timeline dilemmas for the band. Unlike for The Movie, there was no time to play and arrange new tunes live ad nauseam prior to recording.
“I always feel like we get to the good stuff when we have to,” she says of the time constraints. “You can kind of dilly dally around for years if you’re given the opportunity. So it was sort of a more express shot at making a record, but still having all of our ‘isms,’ the bigness and all the arrangements and orchestrations and everything.”
Released on the band’s own Frog Stand Records, the album features a guest spot from My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden as well as a nod to Phil Collins with a cover of the 1983 Genesis hit “That’s All.”
“I’ve just had a crush on that song since I was about five, and I don’t know, whenever I’ve heard it randomly over the years I just, like, scream ‘I love this song!’ and throw my hands up in the air,” she laughs, “So I thought there was something to that.”
From the kitchen to the stage, Clare and the Reasons serves up a quirky blend of pop, mixing ingredients old and new into one delicious helping.  Now, who’s hungry?

— Natalie B. David