From The Desk Of Clem Snide’s Eef Barzelay: Nina Simone’s “Don’t Explain”

When Clem Snide began recording albums more than a decade ago in New York, the band’s clever alt-country songs often came across as an ironic take on Americana. Everyone knows you can’t do country music in the big city, and where did Israeli-born singer/guitarist Eef Barzelay get that twang from, anyway? After years of slogging through the indie-rock touring circuit, a band breakup and a move to Nashville, the reunited Clem Snide has earned the all-American desperation and heartbreak that lies in the marrow of its latest album, The Meat Of Life, out this week on 429 Records. Barzelay is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

Barzelay: I don’t think it gets any better than Nina Simone, and they truly don’t write songs like this anymore. Nowadays, the culture at large promotes self-empowerment and self-actualization, but I much prefer a song like this that comes from a more helpless and vulnerable place. A women’s studies major might take offense at this song, but to me it feels closer to some fundamental human truth. And it could just as well be a man singing, but not me. Though I couldn’t pull it off, maybe Michael Bublé could do it. Bublé! Video after the jump.