NEW EP, SOON WE’LL ALL BE SMOKING, OUT JULY 26, 202
Clothesline From Hell is Toronto-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Adam LaFramboise. His music fuses songs written and performed on acoustic guitar with programmed drums and samples, and the result is imaginative, energetic, and full of color. Today, he shares the new single “You Don’t Know”, which follows in the footsteps of the previous single, “Open Up!”, both of which appear on the upcoming EP, Soon We’ll All Be Smoking.
“I know that ‘You Don’t Know’ started with Limp Bizkit,” says LaFramboise. “I wanted to write a riff like ‘Nookie’, that slithers up and down, hypnotically building and collapsing in on itself. I had been circling James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ break for some time and almost used it as a test of the quality of the songs I was writing, like ‘is this shit really worthy of using such an iconic break?’.
“Vocally, I continued to aim for this sound that I felt like I had found on ‘Open Up!’,” continues LaFramboise. “Keeping things clear and sung intimately, but throwing some weird runs or complexities in the melody like I’d imagine Timberlake would. The result was a bit different than I had imagined … I’d say it was conceived to be a massive sign hanging behind my head saying, “everyone just get the fuck away from me, please”.
The first single from the EP, “Open Up!” features additional writing and production from Matty Tavares (Matty, BADBADNOTGOOD). The song is inspired by outsider songwriters, the post-grunge aesthetics of nu metal, and the breakbeats that drove classic hip hop and Detroit house. Additional EP collaborators include Josh McIntyre (Thermal, Prince Innocence), Nathan Burley (Young Clancy), and Platinum engineer Lars Stalfors (The Dare, Mars Volta).
“I wanted to take the radical honesty of lo-fi acoustic music and cross it with the ugly, sometimes funny extremity of something like the WWE,” LaFramboise explains. “At some point I felt like the only way to keep making new music was to be influenced by nothing, but inspired by everything that has ever changed culture.”
“This was the first song recorded for the EP and in many ways a skeleton key that unlocked a the new sonic path for the project,” he continues. “I can remember us taking a breather and pulling up tracks like Filter’s ‘Take A Picture’ or Third Eye Blind’s ‘How’s It Going To Be’, trying to inspire the creation of what we saw as an Alt-Rock smash. We both tried to play some drums on the track, but ended up preferring the placeholder drum break I had put in, which lead me to use breakbeats on every track for a while. As always, it came out different than we had pictured. It’s like they say in sports, ‘this is why we play the games’. Everything for me starts with just an acoustic guitar and vocal, but eventually becomes a very different thing I can never accurately predict. Through this collaboration, I felt like a part of me internalized for so long finally burst, ushering in a new era of creativity.”