Clutch – Doing it Their Way.
2013 could just be the year of Clutch, a funny thing to say when the band has been around for twenty years.
Tim Sult, lead guitarist of Clutch, talked to us about the reception of their newest album entitled Earth Rocker and the South’s love of Waffle Houses.
“The reception has been surprisingly good. I would say beyond what I ever expected for playing new material. There was actually one day where we played every single new song off the new album, and people didn’t seem disappointed in any way whatsoever. They seemed to know all the words to all the songs already, and seemed to actually enjoy them. It is pretty amazing.”
One thing that makes Earth Rocker special, is it marks the second album the Clutch has put out on their own Weathermaker label. As Sult explains, “Just the fact that everybody around the world knew that it was going to come out,” counts as a win.
“We’ve definitely learned a lot as far as putting out albums goes. With this new album cycle we’ve hired a new label manager, having a label manager keeps everything in focus.”
Weathermaker has only released a few albums, all being Clutch albums or side-projects of Clutch members. “We’ve talked about it a little bit,” Sult says of growing the Weathermaker label to other artist releases, “but there is nothing that is set in stone right now.”
In the last few years Clutch has been featured in numerous TV shows and videogames, steadily helping to bring new ears into the Clutch fandom. “Maybe our audience is both getting younger and older at the same time. There is a lot more younger people, and a lot more senior citizens at the shows these days – but maybe it is just people who, you know, listened to us for the past 20 years and are aging a little too rapidly.”
As for Clutch’s sound, it has always been something hard to categorize, yet embraced by a varied fan base. Sult attributes it to “a lot of our fans are just live music fans.”
Clutch is currently on tour, a short US run followed by a European tour. For much of the US run, Lionize has been one of the opening acts, a band that Sult is an unofficial member of. “I play with them whenever I can,” says Sult. Even regularly taking the stage with the band to “play the song that I am not too lazy to learn. Some of the songs are just way too complicated for me to learn.”
On May 12th Clutch will be at Vinyl Music Hall, and they were last at the venue less than a year ago. Does Sult have any memories of the area? “There are plenty of good Waffle Houses down there. That is mostly my memory of Pensacola, going to a Waffle House on that Sunday.”
As for the European tour, “It is going to be the first time that we have ever gone over to Spain and done our own headlining shows, so that will be pretty fun.“
Clutch has a simple goal moving forward, “We are just going to be doing as many shows as possible and shove Earth Rocker down people’s throats as long as possible.”
A music video should be out sometime this Summer, in the meantime, here are the official lyric videos for Earth Rocker and Crucial Velocity.
Learn more about Earth Rocker at the official website here.
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