Conversations: Clay on Radical Vulnerability in New Soulful Single "Artery"
Photo by Kanya Iwana
CLAY’s heartfelt ballad “Artery” opens up with a bruised, soulful voice, echoed by a loping bassline and pained lyrics that leave listeners with a grip around their hearts.
The songstress practices “radical vulnerability” about songs that manifested from rawness about experiencing a painful relationship. “So goodbye to your lies / To this heartache / There’s only so much I can take / I open this artery / And cut it out so I can breathe / Or else there will be nothing left of me,” CLAY sings.
”Artery” was one of the hardest songs to write because it was so personal and rooted in painful truths for the artist. It’s important that listeners can hear themselves in the song and define what “Artery” represents for them to fill with their own tales of heartbreak and transformative experiences.
“When something seems impossible to talk about, whether it’s traumatic, shameful, embarrassing, light-hearted or dark and moody (in my case usually the latter), I turn to music,” CLAY says. “When a wound is fresh, or even when it’s old yet tender to touch, I turn to music. To melody, to lyrics.”
“Artery” is a fall without a bottom, capturing the ache that comes along with adoring someone who simply doesn’t return the affection. Her music seeks peace through hurt, blanketing us in enough warmth so as to make the medicine go down without the glancing blow that usually accompanies songwriting so direct.
Ballads of resistance and ultimately, a story of moving on and securing stronger boundaries in relationships and friendships can be heard in CLAY’s upcoming EP release “Breathing Into Bloom,” a follow-up to her 2019 “hues” EP.
Photo by Kanya Iwana
[UNPUBLISHED]: Can you give our readers a general background of your industry breakthrough or what fueled your passion for music in the first place?
[CLAY]: I think music kind of chose me. Music found me. So I've been singing forever before I was talking. That's always been my way of communicating. I think writing is my primary form of communication and then singing was just the natural way to bring writing and my voice together, so then songs came out of that. I just started putting them out by myself. In 2016, I put out my first song and I just put one song out a year. I was very, very meticulous and very much a perfectionist for a long time. So I finally made the point where I'm no longer having my songs in a chokehold. I've released them from this notion that everything has to be perfect, and instead I'm sharing still polished songs that have demos, vocals and a bit more of rawness to them. I think it's really important to have truth, especially in the beginning when I'm kind of feeling like I'm at the starting line right. I think it's important to practice radical vulnerability in that space to actually just share something without squeezing perfection out of it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Do you have any artists that you take major inspiration from like either lyrically or instrumentally?
[CLAY]: I think it's funny because most of the artists I listen to are actually not contemporary artists at all. I'm absolutely obsessed with the entire discography of Stevie Wonder. I love him so much, he's my favorite musician of all time. I love Erykah Badu. I love Lauryn Hill and Jill Scott. And I also love Paul Simon and Crosby, Stills and Nash. I love when people are able to capture soul, it doesn't necessarily have to be like the genre of soul music, but very soulful music. I think there's some contemporary artists that captured the almost soliloquy writing of these people and this inner monologue is shared out loud; SZA does it, Frank Ocean does it. It seems like they were plugged directly into source, it just kind of flowed out of them.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What does the songwriting process usually look like for you? Does it change depending on the song or the emotions you evoke?
[CLAY]: It's very sporadic. I have to let the songs come as they want to and I try to have some type of writing as a daily practice, but it doesn't have to be songwriting, even like reading. R Reading or writing as a daily practice. I love reading, it helps me be able to download whatever is happening into something to put out. The process varies on the topic and sometimes if something's really difficult to write, it will come to me in chunks.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your Spotify has over 100,000 monthly listeners, huge congratulations. How does it feel to have that support from fans? Did you expect such a huge response and rise to your popularity?
[CLAY]: It feels pretty incredible to be able to do what I love and have people actually listen to the music. I kind of am in the headspace that as long as I continue to make music that is healing for me and that people who need that same kind of healing will find it. So yeah, just grateful.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your latest single release “Artery'' just dropped last month. Can you talk to me about the inspiration behind the single and just the creative process behind it?
[CLAY]: It was a really hard song for me to write. It is a very painful relationship. It's actually not a romantic relationship, which is the most I'll say about the relationship, but I actually wrote it in 2019. So it's really nice to just have it out in the world and have it no longer belong to me and have some potent healing power for other people. It was a very difficult song to write just because it was letting go and the creation of boundaries, that was a very new concept for me. So kind of building the world around the sadness of the lyrics and building the world in this very cinematic way with live strings and with a fullness and colorful world around this really sad. lyricism is what I was going for.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Why does the single have the name “artery,” how did the title come into fruition for you?
[CLAY]: It’s from that lyric, “I open up this artery and cut it out so I can breathe,” and I felt like that was a really visceral, visual line and lyric. So I decided that was the most captivating.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is a message you hope to convey to listeners from “Artery?”
[CLAY]: I think it's really important to choose yourself and self-love and self. the self is the most important aspect of your life. It is your life that you're living, so if somebody is negatively affecting your well-being, it's really important to take a hard look at that, despite whatever relationship, whether it's a friend, partner, or a parent. I think it's really important to set boundaries and to really choose your own well-being because the only way that you can actually show up for others in this world is if you're okay first.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Moving forward, you've also announced your upcoming EP release “Breathing Into Bloom'' and how it touches on radical vulnerability. Can you talk me through that creative process and what it’s inspired by?
[CLAY]: So I ended up writing a song “Breathing Into Bloom'' with The Wildcards, women that I went to college with who are amazing. And it was super organic and just poured out. I said, ‘I really want to write a song called “Breathing Into Bloom''' and one of them started playing the keys and it just poured out. That title track brought together other songs that I had been working on, and it came together in a body of work. They also played strings for the whole EP as well.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What tracks are you most excited to have fans listen to from this EP and why?
[CLAY]: “Artery,” I’m really excited about just because it's something that has been in my heart for such a long time and it’s very personal so I was excited to have it no longer be in my body and have it out. I'm really excited for a song called “Undertow,” which is a ballad that I wrote when I was 20, so I've been sitting on that for a little while now. I think people are really going to love this song called “Numb.” “Undertow” holds a special place in my heart. It's not a single, it's a ballad. It's very much a ballad, but I'm kind of the ballad queen of my own life, so I just love writing and singing ballads.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How is creating and writing for “Breathing Into Bloom'' different from your process for your 2019 EP “hues.”
[CLAY]: I worked with the same producer for everything for “Breathing Into Bloom.” It really made a difference having one person really polish and oversee everything, and it really made it a lot more cohesive. Moving forward, that's something that I really want to continue doing is making sure that everything really fits together sonically.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What are you most excited for when you release this EP?
[CLAY]: I'm just excited to no longer have the songs in my body. Because I feel like the longer that I hold on to them, they almost clog my creative pores. I'm excited to be able to write new music because these are kind of taking up that space.
[UNPUBLISHED]: If you could describe “Artery” in three words, what words would they be?
[CLAY]: Nostalgic. Melancholic. Bright.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is your wildest dream as an artist, if you can have one thing happen to you or a milestone or collaboration you want to accomplish in your career? What would that look like for you?
[CLAY]: Working with Kendrick Lamar.
Photo by Kanya Iwana