Clayton Bellamy is set to do a little preachin’ and teachin’ on his new album Welcome to the Congregation. Soon to be released through Anthem Music, the album sees the award-winning member of country-rock sensations The Road Hammers, take his solo career in a bold new direction, as he immerses himself in the baptismal font of good old R&B infused rock and roll, complete with gritty guitars, driving rhythms and powerhouse vocal and melodic hooks that have become a hallmark of his writing for nearly 20 years.
Like any proselyte, Bellamy has come forth with a powerful testimonial over the length and breadth of this new album, a work that took a little over two years to assemble, as he endured some difficult times in his personal life, but used that time as a creative crucible to burn away all the detritus and distractions, leaving his core passion for the style of music that he has always loved, and always dreamed of devoting his considerable creative talents to.
With such zeal for the project, it’s little wonder that he has dubbed it Clayton Bellamy and the Congregation.
Going against the trend of rockers and even some metalheads moving into the country or pop country vein, a la Dallas Smith or Steven Tyler, Bellamy is going in the other direction, from the country world to a more classic rock/R&B groove, focussing on the kind of music that inspired him from a young age. It’s Bellamy at his most free and most joyful as he thoroughly enjoyed making original music unfettered by industry expectations, or the limitations of a band or genre.
“I have gone down the rabbit hole for many years to get to this point. But this is it, this is what I am supposed to be doing and it feels great. I have been really lucky to have been a bit of a chameleon through all of this. What I do as a solo act is not really country, it’s not really rock, it’s not really this, it’s not really that. But what’s happened is that I feel that the albums I have made in the past haven’t really resonated. Whereas when I play this new stuff for people, the number one comment I get back is that Clay has finally found his music. And that makes me feel so great because I feel the same way,” said Bellamy.
“I don’t know for others, but I know for me I have always been on that kind of rock and roll side of country music, with my influences being more from Tom Petty and Steve Earle – people who are kind of left of centre. I don’t thing what I am doing now was a big leap for me, but at the same time too, I was definitely feeling that country music as a whole has kind of gone a direction that I can’t really follow any more. Country music is like pop music now and I didn’t want to make an album with beats and make an album that sounds like Beyoncé to get on country radio. That’s not what I wanted to be doing to be fulfilled and really this wasn’t about getting on radio anyways. It was about fulfilling myself as an artist and doing something I felt was worthwhile.
“David Bowie once said it was important to move out into deeper waters where you can’t quite touch bottom, and that’s where you do your best work, because it’s dangerous swimming out there because you can’t touch bottom and you don’t know how deep it is, and you push farther than you are used to going. And that’s why it took so long to make this record because I had to write in ways that I had never written before. It didn’t work like the old way of sitting down with an acoustic guitar in a writer’s room. I had to dig down and come up with new ways to be creative and to write music.”
The result is a collection of songs that are reflective of an artist, and a man, who has lived a life, experienced a lot and has learned lessons from those experiences – often the hard way. He has also learned musical lessons along the way, through his time as a solo artist and for nearly 15 years as a member of Canadian trucker rock/country band The Road Hammers, with Jason McCoy and Chris Byrne. On breaks from the Hammers he has released two solo albums, Everyone’s a Dreamer in 2012 and Five Crow Silver a little over a year later.
“I think a lot of things came down the pipe at the same time. I had a 13-year relationship ending and I was leaving Nashville, a place I had wanted to live my whole life and come back home to Alberta. I was having to kind of rebuild myself, and I decided that I was going to do the same thing with my music, because I was just not creatively happy with where I was and wanted to push some boundaries and just reinvent who I was, essentially,” he said.
“I love what the Road Hammers are doing, and we are continuing to do it, including working on new music as we speak, but it’s got its own flavour and it’s very specific and you can’t really colour outside the lines in the Road Hammers. It is what it is, and that’s it, and so you write for that and that’s awesome. I get it, and I am happy being in the Hammers, but for me as a solo artist, trying to do that, it’s never quite hit the mark. And the thought of doing another singer/songwriter album just didn’t really appeal to me. I don’t want to be the guy that I am right now, so why would I want to be the artist that I am right now, because that’s not who I am any more, that’s not who I am aspiring to be. Basically, I took the blueprint and chucked it out the window and am starting fresh.”
It was producer and pal Scott Baggett who came up with the spark of the idea that led to the project being called Clayton Bellamy and the Congregation.
“Scott always calls me Preacher Man. When I am up on stage with the Road Hammers, doing my thing, he says it’s Clay being the Preacher Man. And I thought, what a great idea if I did the Preacher Man all night long. It would be like leading a congregation and it just kind of rolled right into that, and the next thing you know we had carved out this idea and it really just took off from there,” Bellamy said.
“And what’s so great about it is that the Congregation is everyone. It’s the musicians, it’s the people in the audience, it’s the people who believe the message. It’s also those people who aren’t in the band, but who might sit in on a regular basis, or once in a while, other musicians that I know from the road. I want to build a creative atmosphere and nurture it and have people come and sit in all the time, so you never know who may be at a Congregation show, who is going t be there or what the set list is going to be, because it’s always going to be different. I want it to be like a collective, where it’s not just going to be one person or one thing; it’s a group and it’s a mentality and it’s a vibe.
“To me music is like magic, and when you get out there it’s like moving the spirit. You are moving it around and giving it out to people and they are sending it back. A lot of my favourite bands do what I am talking about, like Big Sugar, or Gov’t Mule or the Allman Brothers, the Rival Sons, Tedeschi-Trucks – they are the kinds of bands that I looked to and thought about when I was making this record. These are the people I grew up admiring and wanting to be like. So why not start there for inspiration.”
The process for creating an album is often described by an artist as a journey. For Bellamy, this is doubly true as he not only delved deep into the recesses of his own heart, soul and spirit, but also physically travelled around the world seeking inspiration and collaborators to help him bring this ambitious creative vision to fruition.
“Writing with great writers in Nashville for the last 10 or 15 years and honing that skill, with lyrics particularly, has been great and those lessons I learned have stayed with me. But I had to come at if from a different approach because when I tried to write rock and roll with some of these people, it wasn’t really rock and roll and it was contrived and frankly, it sucked. At first, I was really disheartened and wondered if I could do it. Maybe I didn’t have the mojo or whatever, but I just kept at it and kept at it, and I wrote probably 200 songs for this record. By the tail end of it, it started to click, and I found some people I could truly collaborate with, that had the same ideas and vibe that I was going for,” he explained.
“One of my main collaborators was Scott Baggett and we would spend hours in the studio, him on the drums and me on guitar cranked up to 11 jamming away to all hours of the night, looking for something that we could land on that was cool. I wrote a couple songs with Jason McCoy and I wrote with lots of people that I had never written with before. I got the chance to fly over to France to write with Simon Climie who is Eric Clapton’s producer. We wrote a song on the [forthcoming] album called One Thing Right.
“I went on a real journey to find people to collaborate with. I was writing in London, I was writing in France, I was writing in Copenhagen, I went all over the place. I went to L.A., I went to Nashville, I went to Toronto – I just wrote and created until I landed on the things that were right.”
The first single to be recorded under the new style and the new banner is Commandment #11 (Love Someone), which could be said to encapsulate the whole vibe of the album, as well as the approach Bellamy has taken to the ups and downs of ill and good fortune in his life over the past few years.
“That’s the overlying tone of the record: peace, love and rock and roll. And maybe it sounds cheesy to some people in this day and age, but I think we need more of those things, personally. And for me the big thing was, where I was coming from in my personal life, going through a really hard thing with my divorce, I could have been miserable and sit around with a bunch of people and commiserate and go on and on about how this person hurt me and this that and the other thing. But I just decided to cover it all with love,” he explained.
“That’s all I did for two years while I was making this record. I was going through the ending of a long-term relationship, but I just continued to speak love over the situation, over her, over the kids, over everything and continued to do that even when I wasn’t feeling it, even when I was hurting the most. But it worked, because we have an excellent relationship and the kids are happy and things are going great because I refused to give in to the idea of, ‘well f*** this, f*** that, I am going to fight for what’s mine.’ But you know what, I decided I was going to fight for love, I am going to fight for that ideal. I am going to fight for the fact that it didn’t work out, but we can have something special and that’s kind of where that song and the whole idea, the whole them of the record came from – it’s surrounded by it.”
Touring plans are still in the works for The Congregation, as Bellamy said he is pushing the music and the new band/brand through conventional and social media to build up a real buzz. There are going to be some showcase gigs in the new year in L.A., Nashville and Toronto.
As well, as mentioned beforehand, Bellamy, McCoy and Byrne are writing material for a new Road Hammers record, with that band having come off a new record as well as a greatest hits package in recent years. Bellamy also contributes material to the southern rock collective group known as Black Mountain Whiskey Rebellion, which issued its debut album this past spring.
For more information, visit http://www.congregationmusic.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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