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From The Desk Of The Orange Peels: A Story About Depression, Mixed Greens And The “Lost” Album Of The Mighty Fairwood Singers

OrangePeelsLogoAs any fan of the Food Network knows, a few scrapes from an orange peel adds zest to a dish. San Francisco Bay Area indie-popsters the Orange Peels, according to master chef Allen Clapp, reinvented themselves by inviting more cooks into the kitchen. The result, Sun Moon (Minty Fresh), is a fully collaborative and very tasty effort. Last summer, Peels bassist (and Clapp’s wife) Jill Pries asked the other two band members—guitarist John Moremen and drummer Gabriel Coan—to drop by their Sunnyvale, Calif., home/studio. “It didn’t mean I was happy about it,” says Clapp, grown used to demoing the band’s material before presenting it to the others. “I told her I didn’t have any songs ready.” Clapp will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Orange Peels feature.

FairwoodSingers

Clapp: Above is album art for a record that never happened—part of it became Mixed Greens, by Allen Clapp & His Orchestra, and part of it became Dawn Of The Fairwood Singers.

When I first started writing the songs that ended up becoming Mixed Greens (Minty Fresh, 2011), I wasn’t thinking it would end up being an album by Allen Clapp & His Orchestra.

In the mid 2000s, around the time my band the Orange Peels was finishing touring on our third album, Circling The Sun, I suddenly began writing a bunch of mid-tempo melancholy ballads. There is a reason for this.

A few of you know this already, but at the time, I was actually suffering from panic disorder and depression, and it was starting to become debilitating. I stopped playing live for more than a year during this time because the panic attacks I was having onstage were so horrifying, I was sure I’d end up in a padded room.

After about a year, the attacks began occurring in non-performance situations as well—driving over a bridge, traveling by airplane, being in a crowded room—and I suddenly understood why some people never want to leave their house. I soon learned that agoraphobia (the fear of leaving your home) is often the end result of having panic attacks in various places in the outside world. I found myself thinking things like, “Well, I had a really bad panic attack at the Troubadour, so I don’t want to play there again.” And soon, those place-specific fears started becoming broader and more general. After a year of this I was telling myself, “I never want to travel by plane ever again,” or, “I’m never driving in rush hour, ever again.” It was easy for me to see how life can become smaller, more tightly controlled, and a lot less fulfilling.

Once you see some of your favorite things being crossed off of life’s list of possibilities, things start getting pretty depressing. Suddenly every trip outside the house becomes fraught with what-ifs and worries-in-advance in an attempt to somehow try and manage the fear of being trapped, or having a panic attack in public. And as it gets worse, even thoughts of having a panic attack can trigger the real thing.

So it was in this state that I found myself in the late days of 2005 and most of 2006. I enrolled in a group at the hospital, saw my doctor about treatment options and read tons of books on the subject.

That was a rough year. I learned a lot about myself, my family and my whole outlook on life, and I think ultimately it’s something that I was bound to go through at some point in my life. The crazy thing is, when I look back at my own song catalog, it’s kind of like I always knew this was going to happen to me.

On my first album, I recorded a song called “Life Before The Breakdown,” which now reads like a note from my 24-year-old lo-fi self to the me of today. On the same record, “Man And Superman” now appears to document my own wonders about my ability to cope with life (later, I rerecorded the song with the Orange Peels).

So here it was: the time to face all this stuff head-on, or face the consequences of living a life inside the confines of my house.

One of the things that happened was the outpouring of these new songs. I think it was kind of my own version of art therapy. I’ve heard other songwriters talk about writing as a way to send messages to yourself, and now I know exactly what they’re talking about. It kind of reminds me in a funny way of this amazing scene from Best In Show.

So I was in a quandary. I wanted to share the songs, but I was also really self-conscious about them because they documented a time in my life that I didn’t know if I wanted the world to know about. So I came up with the idea of the Fairwood Singers. They would be my messengers, my emissaries to the world.

(I had actually “invented” them a few years earlier when I started making my 2002 spacey soft-rock album Available Light. Again, I wanted to hide behind a band name because the material was different enough from the Orange Peels and my earlier solo stuff that I felt self-conscious about it. But alas, I was convinced by March Records main man Jack (Skippy) McFadden to just release it under my own name. So the singers were already hovering around in my conscious mind.)

I recorded about half an album worth of tunes, and then just couldn’t muster the energy to follow through with the project, and the songs sat there like living proof of this dark time in my life. Over the next few years, I started writing for the next Orange Peels album, 2020—which hints at the 20/20 hindsight we all have when looking back on some significant life event. And then more songs started appearing—some more optimistic popsongs, some ambient instrumentals, and I started thinking about putting out a new solo record.

But there was something about those first songs—the ones I wrote in the midst of that awful year—that I couldn’t get past. I felt like I couldn’t move forward until I put those first three songs out—just get them out of my head. So with no fanfare whatsoever, I put them up on iTunes as an EP and called the thing Dawn Of The Fairwood Singers.

I think I sent it out to a grand total of one reviewer: Bill Kopp (Musoscribe, Trouser Press), and he really liked it. (Thank you, Bill, btw.) That was all that needed to happen. The mere act of labeling these songs and making them public had done something magical. Now I felt free to write and finish the rest of the songs that ended up becoming Mixed Greens.

So this brings me to why I originally started writing this post. I wanted to give listeners the option of hearing what the Fairwood Singers full-length album would have sounded like. I was going to call the album My Autumn Heart and even made several artwork ideas for it. And as an option, you could say that with these songs included (see links below), it makes a special Autumn Harvest version of Mixed Greens.

The other reason for this post is the hope that it might do some good. I know a lot of people who struggle with depression, anxiety, panic attacks and worse. It really can be awful, and not all of us live to make albums about it, unfortunately. I have lost friends and family members to despair, and sometimes I wonder if they might have made different choices if they had not felt so alone. Life is just too short, and I figure what the heck … I went through this stuff, and I don’t care who knows about it anymore. I guess I’ve gotten enough distance from the worst of those days in 2005-2006 that I’m able to talk about it now to just about anybody who will listen.

Not that it ever really goes away for good. There was a tenuous moment at the beginning of our Chickfactor set at the Rickshaw Stop last September where I thought I might just spiral into a panic, but then I looked out at all those wonderful people in the audience, glanced around at all the amazing musicians and friends in my band, and the moment passed.

So here we are in 2013. We’ve all made it this far. Some of us haven’t been as lucky. Let’s keep this going. Let’s continue living without fear, and let’s, for Pete’s sake, keep making music.

Love,
Allen

The Fairwood Singers with bonus tracks

Video after the jump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upy95NV9wKk

One reply on “From The Desk Of The Orange Peels: A Story About Depression, Mixed Greens And The “Lost” Album Of The Mighty Fairwood Singers”

Allen
thank you for the insightful, incisive, and and honest blog about depression, anxiety, etc. I am right there with you, and through decent therapy, some EMDR, and a low-dose anti-D, I am feeling like I can move through my days with some semblance of normalcy. I still have to take something to get on a plane (I know, I know), and I still have issues with crowds (well, I’m only 4’11″…sooooo)…but…much appreciated…
Cheers
Lisa

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