Spencer Radcliffe Is the Only Living Boy in the Midwest
Photo by Tina Scarpello

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Spencer Radcliffe Is the Only Living Boy in the Midwest

The reclusive Chicago-via-Ohio songwriter opens up in a rare interview about getting Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else together for 'Enjoy The Great Outdoors,' his second album on Run For Cover.
JT
Chicago, US

Spencer Radcliffe has always let his songs speak for themselves. Whether it's with his band Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else, his long-running ambient project Blithe Field, or his now-defunct emo bands Best Witches and California Furniture, the 25-year-old Chicago-via-Ohio songwriter has avoided interviews and almost anything resembling an online presence. He only recently joined Twitter but uses it so sparingly he's only posted 19 times since November. Sounds like a good life, eh?

Advertisement

"I'm private in nature in the first place," he says. "I don't think I've ever really been too keen on talking about much of anything I do, music or otherwise," Then he adds that the idea of discussing his own music feels like when his parents would ask him about his classes as a kid.

That's not the most encouraging thing to hear before an interview—especially if it's the only one he's giving about his excellent new album Enjoy The Great Outdoors (Run For Cover) under the name Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else. But Radcliffe, though guarded, is undeniably warm and thoughtful in person. Before our chat, he insists on showing me around the old and spacious East Garfield Park house he shares with some of his bandmates (where they practice in the basement). During the tour, Pacey, his sweet and shy adopted hound mix, anxiously follows. "That's her pound name, she got it she used to walk in circles all the time and she still does it when she's really nervous" he says.

In conversation, Radcliffe chooses his words carefully, pausing after every question to gather his thoughts. His patience shouldn't come as a surprise, considering the unhurried nature of songs on Enjoy The Great Outdoors. Take opener "Land & Sea" in which, over ambling drums and slightly twangy guitars, Radcliffe reassuringly sings in a cadence that splits the difference between the talky deliveries of Joan of Arc and Silver Jews: "Woke up to the sound of someone coughing/ then it stopped so I opted to doze off/and when I slept again I dreamt of the sea/an endless wall of salty air blowing into me." The song stretches out for six minutes, with guitars clanging as Radcliffe expands on the theme, "we really ought to make it back to see the things theres still left to see- a million unknown people in the land of the free." Though it moves at a near-glacial pace, not a second is wasted as Radcliffe packs so much hope and feeling into his plainspoken lyrics. It's one of the most striking album openers of the year so far.

Advertisement

"I don't think I've ever really been too keen on talking about much of anything I do, music or otherwise."

Radcliffe's music hasn't always been this expansive. Some of his earliest solo recordings, like his dreamlike 2013 Sinking Down cassette or the two songs he contributed to the ambitious, Magnetic Fields-parodying 420 Love Songs compilation—which featured (Sandy) Alex G, Sam Ray's projects Ricky Eat Acid and Teen Suicide, and many more—were eccentric and intimate bedroom recorded sketches, showcasing an artist constantly experimenting and tweaking his voice. Though he spit his time fronting bands like California Furniture and the mathier, louder Best Witches, his own music was always a solitary endeavor, "Playing in those bands, I had no greater of a role than anyone else did. I didn't have to come up with full songs at rehearsals. Anything I would write on my own were my own songs."

While Sinking Down and Radcliffe's later 15-minute tapes 2013's Wet Pink Construction Paper Mask and 2014's Keeper have been long deleted from Bandcamp, they're well worth tracking down on YouTube for Radcliffe's affecting and unconventional songs, not unlike the best of Teen Suicide or (Sandy) Alex G's early catalog. "I think for people in my age range who are making music in this general universe, [(Sandy)] Alex G has influenced everyone, which is cool. It's not hard to be grouped in with artists like him," he says.

Advertisement

Photo by Tina Scarpello

Following the split album Brown Horse he put out with songwriter R.L. Kelly on Orchid Tapes in 2014, his songwriting was getting more focused and direct. "At that point, I was playing pretty sparsely—never venues but only at someone's house where there were just people with guitars," he says. Instead, he spent most of his time crafting what would become his debut solo full-length Looking In: "I was working on that album at home, on my own, somewhere from six months to a year with no particular plans for it other than to put it out on my own." He adds, "I had never done what I felt was an accomplished full-length by myself and when it was finished or maybe 90 percent done I sent it to some of my friends and someone showed it to Run For Cover. When the label told me they wanted to put it out, that sounded good to me."

Looking In, his most fully-realized yet, could go from comforting, slowcore inspired folk songs like "Mermaid," jangly emo anthems like "Mia" or bleeping, found sounds sample-heavy experiments in the title track. With his music finding a label which was home to acts like (Sandy) Alex G and Teen Suicide, and his arrangements not suited for a one man show, Radcliffe looked to amp up his live act, "I started playing more, especially at shows like Beat Kitchen or Subterranean, so I got a band together, which was basically everyone I was living with at the time." In 2015, the group went on brief stints with (Sandy) Alex G, LVL Up, and Pinegrove and Radcliffe started to see his songs change. He explains: "When you're touring and the more you play songs with people, the more the parts start to branch out."

Advertisement

His next album would be a band affair, his first billed as Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else, which consisted of six of his closest friends and collaborators fleshing out his songs. "At the end of the 2015 tour, I was kind of getting dependent on the band where I didn't really want to play on my own after that," said Radcliffe, before deadpanning, "we were already making shirts that said 'Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else' so I didn't want it to be fundamentally confusing." At ten tracks, Enjoy The Great Outdoors sounds downright pristine compared to the ramshackle bedroom recordings of his earlier oeuvre, with songs like "Breezy" featuring a glistening guitar lead from Grant Engstrom and one of Radcliffe's tightest melodies. With the tracks coming together quickly in the studio, Radcliffe explained, "The band had ideas different than mine that made the music more diverse."

"A couple of the songs predate the process of writing the album, at least the bare-bones version of them. I guess the oldest songs were either 'Trust' or 'Flag,'" he offered. The former is perhaps the darkest on the record, singing atop slurring riffs, Radcliffe describes coughing up blood after being drugged and trying to figure who put something in his drink while realizing, "cause the truth is never easy, always painful as fuck, fuck, fuck." While darkness occasionally lurks underneath the breezy, Americana-tinged arrangements, elsewhere it's sunnier like on "In The Clear." The catchiest, most-upbeat track on the record, Radcliffe lends some optimism while chanting, "Hope, faith, knowing, fear/Time stops, we're in the clear."

Photo by Tina Scarpello

"Especially from living here and being a student of sound, I've always loved Steve Albini's recordings. Just the idea of recording an album, not producing it, while making the songs sound as good as you can with what you have," says Radcliffe, citing the simplicity of a record like Palace Music's 1995 Viva Las Blues as an influence. That skeletal approach shines on a track like "Slamming On The Brakes," which Radcliffe recalled as the song that took the fastest to write and record. It's a droning, haunting play on The Sound of Music's "Do-Re-Mi" with the line, "Doe, A deer, A female deer, Crashing through the windshield, lips dry, eyes peeled" the morphs into a dark meditation on mortality.

Enjoy The Great Outdoors is a beautiful record, one that's painfully open and introspective. But Radcliffe himself is tough to pin down. Even after talking with me for close to an hour, he is still careful not to divulge too much about himself or his headspace. "I'm worried that with doing interviews, I figure a lot of the time it ends up being instructions on how to listen to the music," he says. "Something can't be unread once you've read what someone thinks about their own work. I'd like for people to think for themselves."

Josh Terry is the other living boy in the midwest. Follow him on Twitter.