Too Far (Rock Ridge Music) was a long time coming. In 2018, when his promising SoCal indie-grass band the Show Ponies called it quits, Clayton Chaney wasn’t sure if a solo career was feasible. But what other choice did he have?
“The thought of not making it as an artist was a devastating thought to me,” says the Arkansas native.
Chaney put out an EP in 2020, followed by a few singles the following year. Then came a COVID-induced epiphany. “I finally arrived at a point in 2022 where I was just grateful for my lot in life and didn’t feel like I needed music to define who I was,” says Chaney.
That spring, Chaney was playing a tiny local show near his Pasadena, Calif., home when he was approached by a generous donor who offered to pay for Chaney’s next album. “It felt totally out of nowhere, but I accepted,” he says. “I had a few songs together at that time. By the end of the year, I had enough for a whole album.
Too Far was recorded back in the spring of 2023, a few months before the birth of Chaney’s first son. “I figured I could release the album by the end of 2023, but it turns out having a child takes up a lot of time,” says Chaney. “It’s been almost four years since I received the gift to fund this album, but it feels more like four months. Time is moving fast.”
Here’s more on Too Far from Chaney.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “When The Light Comes In”
“This is an outright positive gospel tune. I’ve been more discreet about my faith in recent years and struggled with deciding to open the album with this song. But I think, at its heart, the song is more universally agreeable than it is religiously divisive, so I’m sticking with it. I was vibing on ‘Peace Train’ by Yusef/Cat Stevens and ‘Biloxi’ by Hiss Golden Messenger when I sat down to write the acoustic guitar riff. Somehow, Ralph Stanley’s ‘O Death’ came to mind when I started the first lyric.”
2) “Don’t Know What I’d Do”
“This song was written shortly after my marriage withstood a pretty gnarly test. When I sing the chorus, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ I mean it two ways. The first way is the obvious sweet way. The second way is more fear-based: ‘I’m overly dependent on you, I don’t know how I’d functionally operate in the world without this relationship, and I’m scared for you to ever leave me.’ The verses are meant to paint a common caricature of a man: myself.”
3) “Susanna”
“One of those songs where the acoustic-guitar riff came first. It was just something I was messing around with and needed some verses and choruses to stick the hook between. Coming out of the COVID era, I felt like my brain was still running an outdated operating system. I was having trouble updating the software of my mind to whatever new era we’re in now. I was constantly wishing I could go back to how things were before COVID happened. I was experiencing the feeling that the good old days were behind me. Nostalgia isn’t bad. But constantly wishing you’re in another time period is.”
4) “Can’t Turn It Back”
“When I turned 35, I felt a significant shift in the way I experience time. Time feels incredibly fast and scarce now. I think it has to do with the law of supply and demand. When we’re young, time feels slow because we have a high supply of it. Now that I’m dealing with a lower time supply, it feels faster and more limited. Sometimes it feels like riding on a train and seeing your life whiz by through the window.”
5) “Same Things”
“In 2020, every day felt the same. For months, I’d get up, check the news to see how many new COVID cases there were, go to work, come home, check the news, then go to bed and do effectively the same thing the next day. The monotony was exhausting. In May 2020, George Floyd was killed. It was then that the phase ‘history repeats itself’ really struck me. There was a vicious cycle of unarmed black men being killed by the police. The media would go crazy, protests would happen, and the protests would turn into riots. Then the media would report on something else for a while. I didn’t want to write specifically about police brutality and systematic racism, so I decided to make the song extremely broad and general.”
6) “Roots Grow Deep”
“When my wife and I got married, we kicked out her roommate, and I moved in with her in her apartment in Glendale, Calif. It was one of those classic apartment buildings built in the ’60s with the second story overlooking the pool in the center of the courtyard—where the carpets are clean when you first move in, but then, somehow, decades-old stains resurface after living there a few weeks. When the walls get repainted between tenants, they paint over sockets and switches. The blinds only kind of open, and you’re scared of burning down the complex every time you turn on the wall heater. We thought we’d live there six months to a year, then find our first place together as newlyweds. We lived there for almost seven years. It was rent-controlled. The bridge is ripped from ‘Wherever We Are,’ an early song I wrote for the Show Ponies. It says, ‘We’ll never be where we want to be until we want to be where we are.’”
7) “Something About Los Angeles”
“It took me about 15 years of living in Los Angeles to love it. I originally saw myself in the movie business. I didn’t make it past being an extra. My skin was not quite thick enough to deal with the perpetual rejection of not getting cast in something. Music eventually took over as the main creative force that kept me in L.A., even though my band was typically touring out of state to make any money. It’s easier to see the beauty in a place when you don’t expect anything out of it.”
8) “Everything That Goes Away”
“I started writing this in 2016. I abandoned it for a long time, then came back to it. It’s inspired by a song my brother, Travis, wrote called ‘Bakersfield.’ His song is about a kid in Oklahoma running away from his responsibilities. He goes to California to start a new life. He ends up in Bakersfield doing the exact same thing he was doing in Oklahoma in a place that, in many ways, is the same as Oklahoma. The kid in the song never changes—he just changes his location. Boy, can I relate to that.”
9) “Too Far”
“When I play ‘Too Far’ live, I always preface it by saying, ‘Comedy is just tragedy plus time. This song may sound sad right now, but give it some time, and it’ll eventually be hilarious.’ I intended the song to be darkly humorous. I had ‘A World So Full Of Love’ by Roger Miller in mind when I was writing. It’s a sad song, but it comes off as kind of funny to me.”
See Clayton Chaney live.
