CLOTHESLINE FROM HELL RELEASES SOON WE’LL ALL BE SMOKING, OUT NOW
Clothesline From Hell, the Toronto-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Adam LaFramboise, releases his new EP, Soon We’ll All Be Smoking. Fusing songs written and performed on acoustic guitar with programmed drums and samples, the result is imaginative, energetic, and full of color.
On the EP, LaFramboise says,
“I’d like to say the title is a reference to a Delillo novel or something cool, but I actually stole it from season 2 of The Bear. I only saw the scene once but if I remember correctly, the staff is getting overwhelmed by a dinner rush or whatever and someone shouts something to the effect of ‘don’t worry, soon we’ll all be smoking’. It struck me immediately and I started thinking about the trickiness of living oriented toward rewards. It’s always like ‘once I do this, then I’ll have this’ and a lot of the time, the reward is the least interesting part. Something as banal as a cigarette; something as toxic as a cigarette. I feel like not getting caught in this loop is the whole battle of living. But, I’d be lying if I acknowledge that I probably named this EP after that line as a way of promising myself and others that if we get this done, rock stardom awaits us. I’m still daydreaming about that sort of thing and smoking even though I know it’s really bad for me.”
Clothesline From Hell has shared one last track from the EP, “The Way It Goes”, of which LaFramboise says he
“wanted to make a quiet song about the paradoxes of living in the city as a student. It’s like smoking cigarettes outside the bar talking about Byung Chul Han, noticing someone nodding out or sleeping on the street next to you, and feeling incredibly stupid for dedicating your energy to pure intellectualization. It’s mostly a condemnation of myself, as I don’t want to tell anyone else that their endeavours are pointless, but I do think that there is a healthy amount of guilt to be felt about this sort of thing. I could reference virtue signalling or namecheck Instagram stories, but that does not seem like the root of the problem to me; it’s simply tragic to witness the disparity of wealth and opportunity, while feeling incapable of saying anything worthy of the pain. We threw drums on it and these looming electric guitars that sort of degrade as they ring out, and now all I see when listening to it is people marching and things burning. But, I also hope that it goes down easy for others and is read as a pop song, as the conclusion is positive. It’s just a process of assessing the world, losing the will to live and then finding that will again and loving the people you do. Though, I say it better in the song.”
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 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.”