by Giliann Karon (@gilposting)
On Golden Caravan, Clifford presents the best of what Boston DIY has to offer. With direct throughlines to local influences and creative processes rooted in cost-effective collaboration, Miles Chandler dissects what it means to prosper in America. Deploying his background in community development, Chandler gets candid about the moral cost of individual economic stability.
Clifford don’t reinvent the wheel with twangy riffs and sludgy distortions – nods to Boston favorites Ovlov and Pile – but their smattering of musical touchpoints ensures they’re not just trying to capitalize on nostalgia. Joined by Nate Scaringi (bass), Ben Curell (drums), and Danny Edlin (guitar), Clifford arrives on Golden Caravan fully formed and lifting others as they go.
Clifford by Maria Gelsomini
GILIANN KARON: What is a golden caravan and why is it important to you?
MILES CHANDLER: It's not a real thing, but it's close enough to a real thing that it conjures a bunch of images. It's my attempt at describing the way you get locked into pursuing prosperity in the US. It's maybe a related concept to the rat race, but it's not just about competition. You can pursue immense prosperity here, but it comes at a cost. Once you step into that realm, it's hard to back out.
GK: So much of your album is about how phones can help us build careers or connect with people across the world, but we're also constantly exposed to the worst brutalities at all times and you can't look away. What is your relationship like with social media and has it changed at all since writing the album?
MC: I'm in a huge Instagram detox right now, which has been really nice. I wouldn't say the album is explicitly about phones, although the way social media has enabled the live broadcasting of the genocide in Gaza for the past couple years has been hard to ignore. It’s definitely conditioned my day-to-day emotional life pretty harshly for a couple years at this point.
That's where a lot of the anger on the album came from, being so clearly exposed to these awful things that are happening, and feeling somewhat powerless to stop them as an individual. Social media is incredibly alienating and while it may be a collective endeavor, it still ends up pigeonholing you and making you feel pretty lonely. We all know this to be true.
At the same time, it's a really interesting tool for a musician to have. A lot of business I conducted is over Instagram DMs or something. I wish it was more over email because that’s more of a neutral space and I'm not being constantly pulled towards watching Reels or whatever.
It's a weird and funky and ever-evolving place. It has some great things about it, but it has some pretty evil things about it too. I think I probably relate to it as many people our age do.
GK: What track do you think is the thesis of Golden Caravan?
MC: I hope it doesn't have one. I want it to be open to interpretation in a way that if it had a central thesis, it maybe would be a little closed off.
I guess the title track pulls together a bunch of the different themes on the album pretty succinctly. It took me a long time to write that one 'cause I didn't really know what to do with the chorus parts. I'd already written the verses, which are very much about entering the workforce and feeling conflicted about having access to prosperity.
Basically, it was about getting a day job and having some money for the first time, but also thinking about where that money came from, and what it keeps me from doing and keeps people who work for a living invested in. It's a trade off. You buy into a system, you're paid for it.
It was nebulous, obviously, because I'm having a hard time describing it. It was generally about feeling unsettled about shaking that hand. I wasn't really sure why I was feeling unsettled. I was like, "how could this be a bad thing? I'm leaning into prosperity. It's nice to have nice things."
When things started happening in Gaza two years ago and the tone of political discourse in the US shifted pretty radically, I think it became much more obvious that we're living in an empire that is actively developing and continuing to do evil things.
Then, it becomes a little more obvious why it's unsettling to lean into that prosperity when there's this enormous concentration of wealth and influence. You can share in that, but you're also sharing in the grievous ills that created it. Maybe that's a thesis of some sort.
GK: The album took a while to come to fruition because of work, life, etc. Did you make any decisions or export any work to other people to economize the process?
MC: I think it was almost the exact opposite of that. At every stage there was no economizing going on. We're all very stalwart DIY-ers. Our bass player, Nate [Scaringi], who mostly engineered the record, has worked at all points in the recording pipeline.
We are happy to sacrifice time to save money, and I think this record was an extreme example of that. Not even that it took so long, just because we were trying to save money. It was free to record, by the way. During staff hours, we tracked it all at the studio Nate was working at, which was a piecemeal year-plus long process.
Nate mostly mixed it. I mixed a couple songs and did a lot of the production work, which took a really long time and ate up free time for both of us for substantially into the next year. There are many mixers who could have done a good job, but we were being really intentional while recording about trying to find the exact right sounds.
We ended up getting pretty much exactly what we wanted down on paper every single time, even if it meant rerecording things. We rerecorded the entirety of Golden Caravan because we went on tour, played it live, and it just was feeling a lot better after we got back.
It was a very laborious and time intensive process, but not one of compromise, which I think was a great learning process. I don't know if I’d do it that way again, but maybe we wouldn't have to because we now know what we like.
GK: It’s always cool observing how the DIY ethic manifests differently as bands get older, tour more, and learn more about themselves.
MC: I hold that very near and dear. I think it's really important to keep the DIY spirit alive.
GK: What was the hardest song to write?
MC: ”Golden Caravan” was a song I was stuck on for a long time, but once the pieces clicked, it was easy to finish. It was a pain in the ass to have it stuck halfway for a long time. “Trackstarr”, “C Song”, and a couple other ones I wrote all in the same week when I had COVID for the first time.
I holed myself up in my room and I didn't have anything else to do, so I was writing a lot. Sometimes I just have little spurts where I'll write a couple things. "Dearest One" was also hard to finish 'cause it's just a weird piece of music to me. I love all my children equally, but some of them maybe more than others.
"Golden Caravan" is probably the strangest one to write 'cause it took so long and it wasn't even a concerted effort the whole time. I had it on the back burner for at least eight months once I'd written the verses, and then because of life circumstances and things happening in the world, I decided it was a good time to finish.
GK: What is your favorite instrument or effect or texture you used on Golden Caravan?
MC: God, that's hard. I love a recording that has really evil distortion on it. It sounds like you've broken something. I wanted to try and capture some of that. The intro to "C Song" is a good example where we were trying to capture something truly ugly, maybe a peculiar pursuit.
I wanted things to sound a little fucked and broken. To be successful in its themes, this album needed to have a bit of an edge. It's really difficult to ride the line between sensitivity and full emotional expression, but also bringing power, aggression, and violence to your music. It was really fun to find moments to seed really jarring things throughout. I really love those squeals.
GK: Over time, you've shifted away from harsh metal towards something a little softer and fuzzier. You even call yourself “genre defectors.” What inspired the change and was it a conscious decision or just a conclusion you came to as a group after the fact?
MC: I don't know. I would love to go make some more head banging shit. It was just a kind of circumstance. This batch of songs I wrote was very much rooted in the Americana tradition. I hope that our background is a post-punk loving band and a post-punk, post rock loving group of people shines through as well. That's something I never want to be vacant from the Clifford repertoire.
That flexibility is one of my favorite things about this band. We have a wide enough catalog of songs that we can fit most bills, which I'm really proud of. I think that being able to step onto a true punk show bill and, hold our own, but also be able to play like coffee shop gigs if we need to, is uncommon. Not an intentional choice, just happened to be the moment and I think people can expect more loud shit from us in the future.
GK: What albums did you listen to as a band while writing and recording?
MC: Gosh, there's so many. Maybe pulling from our scene in Boston, Pile is a huge influence on us. That's a band that's really good at welding sensitivity and creative songwriting onto really aggressive, flushed out rock music. Pile's always been a big influence. What else were we listening to?
Let's say Pile and Ovlov. My car doesn't do Bluetooth, so I just have the same eight CDs in it.
Old country classics, newer country classics. Unwound, DC post hardcore stuff from the nineties. We all have pretty distinct music tastes, so we don't spend a whole lot of time listening to music together.
I actually find myself not listening to all that much music, which is embarrassing. I should be listening to more music. Maybe I'm too picky. When I find something I really love, I really love it and I listen to it a lot, which is why I gave you such a short list.
There's a narrow subset of bands that I really love. I also know who's behind the music and that doesn't turn me off. Sometimes it does. Sometimes, I'll find a record I really love and then I'll meet the people behind it and it changes my interpretation of their music. Sometimes it makes me like it more, and sometimes I'm like, “ah, this sucks.”
GK: Who in your local scene do you look up to?
MC: So many people! Paper Lady just moved to New York. Go check them out. They're dear friends of ours. They recorded their most recent album in the same facility as us while we were recording Golden Caravan. I really look up to them. They're just on their shit. They're really good at the business side of things, and they also have a really unique sound. I love them.
There's a band called Alexander. Alexander's a really great guy and writes prolifically, really good songs that are hyper literate. Very cool, slow core.
I definitely look up to some of the older members of the community, like Pile. Ovlov is an interesting one. I don't even know if they technically count as a Boston band anymore 'cause they're more like a Northeast band.
Members of that band have been very supportive of us over the years. It was a trip to meet them initially because I was like, "oh my God, you're that person from this band I love,", but they're just totally unassuming, very nice people.
I would say that's true of most people who are pillars of the DIY or rock community in Boston. Who else do we look up to? It's hard to name all your friends. It's a mutually supportive process. We really do lean on everybody here. If I played a show with somebody, it means I like them, because why else would I play a show with them?
We appreciate things about everyone in our little community here.
Clifford’s Golden Caravan is out now.