Clem Snide and Abe Partridge at Turntable in Indianapolis on Wednesday, April 16, 2025!
Clem Snide
“The last ten years have been a rollercoaster of deep despair and amazing opportunities that somehow present themselves at the last possible second,” says Eef Barzelay. “That this record even exists, as far as I’m concerned, is a genuine miracle.”
Indeed, the road to ‘Forever Just Beyond,’ Barzelay’s stunning new album under the Clem Snide moniker, was an unlikely one, to say the least. Produced by Scott Avett of The Avett Brothers, the record is a work of exquisite beauty and profound questioning, a reckoning with faith and reality that rushes headlong into the unknown and the unknowable. The songs here grapple with hope and depression, identity and perception, God and the afterlife, all captured through Barzelay’s uniquely off-kilter lens and rendered with an intimate, understated air that suggests the tender comfort of a late-night conversation between old friends. Avett’s production is similarly warm and inviting, and the careful, spacious arrangement of gentle guitars and spare percussion carves a wide path for Barzelay’s insightful lyrics and idiosyncratic delivery. Listening to the album now, Avett and Barzelay sound like an obvious pairing, but the truth is that there was nothing obvious about the survival of Clem Snide, and the series of cosmic coincidences that led to ‘Forever Just Beyond’ remains inexplicable even to Barzelay himself.
“About ten years ago, everything just seemed to fall apart,” he explains. “The band bottomed out, I lost my house, and I had to declare bankruptcy. That started this process of ego death for me, where I realized the only way to survive would be to transcend myself and to try to find some kind of deeper, spiritual relationship with life and with being. Once I committed myself to that, miraculous things started to happen.”
Some miracles were financial (a superfan in Spain, for instance, sent Barzelay an unsolicited thank-you-for-the-music donation that covered the exact amount he desperately owed his bankruptcy lawyer); other miracles were more intangible. Roughly four or five years ago, as Barzelay struggled with how and if to carry on, a fan sent him a video of Scott Avett singing a Clem Snide song in front of a massive audience. Shortly after that, another fan sent an interview in which Avett raved about Clem Snide’s music. It seemed like a sign from the universe.
“I had just hit this low point where I realized I couldn’t do it alone anymore,” says Barzelay. “I passed along a little message and a new song I wrote to The Avett Brothers’ manager, and Scott wrote me right back to say what a fan he was.”
Avett was far from alone in his love for Clem Snide. Named for a William S. Burroughs character, the project first emerged from Boston as a three-piece in the early 1990s and would go on to become a cult and critical favorite, picking up high-profile fans from Bon Iver to Ben Folds over the course of three decades and more than a dozen albums. NPR highlighted the Israeli-born Barzelay as “the most underrated songwriter in the business today, with a sneakily firm grasp on poignancy and humor,” while Rolling Stone hailed his songwriting as “soulful and incisive,” and The New Yorker praised the music’s “soothing melodies and candid wit.” Avett came to the music late, only discovering it in 2016, but he fell hard, saying in an interview, “With Clem Snide’s songs, I feel like there is a voice that I understand very well… It just ignited my own writing. Which is the best flattery for me, that I listen to something and next thing I know I’m at the piano.”
If Barzelay’s music pushed Avett to write more, the feeling was certainly mutual. Avett’s interest in producing the next Clem Snide record was like a shot of adrenaline, and Barzelay quickly found himself deep in the writing process, with a slew of new songs he’d written both on his own and remotely with Avett.
“Scott offered so much encouragement to keep the faith with my career and write these songs,” says Barzelay, who trades off lead vocal duties with Avett throughout the album. “He and I come from very different backgrounds, but we both wrestle with the same things in our music, so there was this unspoken connection between us from the very beginning.”
“I look up to Eef with total respect and admiration,” adds Avett, “and I hope to survive like he survives: with total love for the new and the unknown. Eef’s a crooner and an indie darling by sound and a mystic sage by depth. That’s not common, but it’s beautiful.”
Rather than head into a traditional studio, the two decided to record the guts of the album on Avett’s farm in North Carolina, where they converted Scott’s painting space into a makeshift recording setup. They sourced a core band that included bassist Bill Reynolds (Band of Horses, Lissie) and drummer Mike Marsh (The Avett Brothers, Dashboard Confessional), and worked raw and loose to cut basic tracks live. Next, Barzelay headed to his adopted hometown of Nashville, TN, where he finished vocals and guitars and layered up additional parts from guests like Old Crow Medicine Show fiddler Ketch Secor and Avett Brothers cellist Joe Kwon. In the end, it was four long years between Avett and Barzelay’s initial introduction and the completion of the album, but those lean times provided the fodder for some of Barzelay’s strongest, most thought-provoking writing to date.
“The line between desperation and inspiration has always been quite thin for me,” says Barzelay. “You don’t have to suffer to be an artist, but I think there’s got to be some heat on you, because the ultimate goal is always to turn sorrow into grace.”
That emotional alchemy is a defining characteristic of the record, which opens with the haunting “Roger Ebert.” Joined by Avett on harmonies, Barzelay spins the famed film critic’s final words into a gorgeous meditation on the mysteries of life and death on the track, which, like much of the album, seeks comfort in the acceptance of the inevitable. The breezy “Don’t Bring No Ladder” aims to shed the material trappings of the corporeal world, while the dreamy title track learns to find gratitude even in suffering, and “The Stuff Of Us” contemplates the infinite power of the unseen.
“All this flesh and blood, that’s not the realest part of us,” says Barzelay. “The real stuff is eternal and free. They say that 95% of the universe is held together by dark matter that we can’t see and we can’t measure, but we know it’s got to be there, and if that’s not a metaphor, than I don’t know what is.”
While much of the album tackles these big picture ideas, Barzelay’s strength as a writer has always been in his specificity, and he manages to humanize thorny existential issues on the record with a novelist’s deft touch. The bare bones “Emily” comes to terms with the fact that the only mind you can ever truly change is your own, while “The Ballad Of Eef Barzelay” offers a philosophical take on suicide and redemption, and the cinematic “Easy” considers the necessity of delusion to our survival.
“Everybody has their own reality,” says Barzelay. “We’re all just seeing the world through these little keyholes, but maybe that’s all our eyes can take.”
With ‘Forever Just Beyond,’ Barzelay opens his eyes just a little bit wider, and in the process, manages to show us a world beyond the world we know. And that? That’s a genuine miracle.
Abe Partridge
Abe Partridge is a heralded musician, singer/songwriter, visual artist, and podcaster based in Mobile, Alabama. His 2018 debut, Cotton Fields and Blood For Days earned him rave reviews, with Tony Paris saying in The Bitter Southerner: "He plays guitar the same way he writes lyrics, bashing the strings with abandon until they are just about to come loose, then beautifully picking the notes until every last word falls into place. More to the point, Partridge writes to make you sit up and think. He wants to jar your reality. Sometimes, his lyrics are sly and subtle. Sometimes they come at you with a roar and thunder, as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were approaching, and the heavens were opening up to herald a warning."
Since the release of his debut, Partridge has toured relentlessly, including several tours of the Netherlands and the U.K. developing a reputation for moving, passionate, and sometimes comedic, performances at prestigious songwriter festivals such as 30A Songwriters Festival, Frank Brown Songwriters Festival, and Americanafest. He is a regular at the Bluebird Café in Nashville and Eddie’s Attic in Decatur. He has performed on the syndicated radio programs, Mountain Stage and Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour. He has shared the stage with Morgan Wade, Paul Thorn, Steve Poltz, Dan Bern, Jerry Joseph, Glen Phillips (Toad The Wet Sprocket), Tommy Stinson, Shawn Mullins, John Fullbright, and more.
Most recently, Partridge and co-producer Ferrill Gibbs released the Alabama Astronaut podcast, where they explore songs previously undocumented at churches in Appalachia. The podcast finds Partridge chatting with Holiness preachers and looking into the practice of snake handling. It was in the Top Ten documentary podcasts on Apple Podcasts within days of its release and now has over 40k downloads and a 4.9-star rating.
When Partridge is not writing or touring, he is also a highly acclaimed visual artist. His paintings, primarily acrylic on tarred board and watercolors, now hang in art galleries around the southeast and in the private collections of Tyler Childers, Mike Wolfe (American Pickers), Rick Hirsch (Wet Willie), and Tommy Prine. His artwork was featured in Stephen King’s 2019 sequel to The Shining - Dr. Sleep. He painted the cover art for Charlie Parr’s, Last Of The Better Days Ahead (Smithsonian Folkways). He also created art for Tyler Childers’ 2022 release, Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven?
American Songwriter Magazine said, “Abe Partridge has established himself as one of the most respected songwriters and visual folk artists in the southeast.”
In November of 2022, Partridge released the EP Alabama Skies on Baldwin Co. Public Records label which includes "Abe Partridge’s 403d Freakout". Partridge told Songfacts the story behind the song: " 'Abe Partridge's 403d Freakout' was a song I wrote in about 20 minutes. It took me two weeks to make it rhyme, and then it took me about six months to learn it. I just sat and wrote a couple of pages of thoughts as they came to me. It was my attempt at describing my thoughts chronologically as they sometimes occur in my head before I filter them. It is those thoughts that I often have if I allow myself to mentally wander."
Partridge's exhibit With Signs Following was on exhibition at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center in Mobile, AL from January 13 - May 20 of 2023 and is expected to travel to other city contemporary art centers in the next few years. His full-length studio album, Love In The Dark, on BCPR label, was released on May 12, 2023.
CLEM SNIDE & ABE PARTRIDGE
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 2025
18+
TURNTABLE
INDIANAPOLIS, IN
TICKETS AT TURNTABLEINDY.COM
ABOUT TURNTABLE
Turntable is Forty5's newest venue, nestled in the vibrant Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis at 6281 N College Avenue. Adjacent to The Vogue Theatre, this recently revitalized space exudes the charm of an exclusive speakeasy.
The front features a stylish bar and vinyl listening room, while the back opens up into an expansive concert hall, purpose built for live music. Reimagined to be inviting and warm, it’s a place built for discovering your next favorite artist.
PLEASE NOTE:
THIS SHOW IS GENERAL ADMISSION AND SEATING IS NOT PROVIDED. YOU MUST BE 18+ TO ENTER THE VENUE WITH A VALID FORM OF IDENTIFICATION. ALL TICKETS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE. TWO FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION MAY BE REQUIRED FOR ENTRY.
