ABOUT THE BAND

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Clap the Houses Dark

now streaming on all major platforms

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It might come as a surprise that Clap the Houses Dark, a band crackling with electric guitar and drums, is fronted by poets: Greg Glazner and Jon Davis, with 20 published books between them and awards including The Walt Whitman Award, NEA Fellowships, and a Lannan Literary Award. The band is all-in on the music, as its own force, fused with sculpted words. With Glazner on guitar, vocals, music composition and lyrics, Davis on vocals and lyric composition, Jon Lucero on bass, and a roster of drummers including Tommy Archuleta, Jon Trujillo (also the band’s recording engineer), and Mikey Chavez, Clap the Houses Dark sets out to rock, trance, float, tell, sing, grate, and invent its own way, in language and sound.

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When last seen in Santa Fe, Clap the Houses Dark had just finished recording their first album at Frogville Studios. Now that album is in the world, streaming on Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, and iTunes. On Clap the Houses Dark, the album, the band is  making a new kind of music—complex compositions and improvisations that are in close relationship with poetic language. “I wouldn’t be able to describe the sound,” poet Greg Glazner says, “but I’m sure the music we’ve loved has made our sound possible: Radiohead, Television, Wilco, Oxbow, Talking Heads, King Crimson, jazz, blues, minimalist compositions, on and on…”

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Poetry has been the major influence on the band’s words. Glazner, author of four collections of poetry and past professor at College of Santa Fe and instructor at UC Davis, and Jon Davis, past Poet Laureate of Santa Fe and author of 14 collections of poetry, write and (mostly) speak the words. Davis jokes that he’s also the lead and backup talker. Collections by Wallace Stevens, Larry Levis, and Carl Phillips are among the heavily read books on their shelves. Glazner composes the music, speaks, sings on occasion, and plays electric guitar. Presiding over one drum kit on the album is the current Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, Tommy Archuleta, powering the rhythm section alongside accomplished bassist Jon Lucero and engineer and drummer Jon Trujillo. When Archuleta took leave of the band to devote time to his family and his busy public life as a poet, Mikey Chavez joined on drums. Everyone in Clap the Houses Dark is ultimately a collaborator.

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In May of 2022, in Glazner’s home studio in Sacramento, California, Glazner and Davis had put together “Coming Over the Transom,” a piece that showed the potential of a new approach. They had decided against setting existing poems to music, which had been Glazner’s method for many years. Instead, they had started from scratch letting words and music take form together, and the result had the force and unity of a complex rock song. Then they needed a band. Tommy Archuleta, renowned drummer and Glazner’s former poetry student at the College of Santa Fe, recruited his long-time friends Jon Lucero and Jon Trujillo, and the band was launched. “These guys are incredibly talented and inventive,” Trujillo says. “Thanks to everyone’s collaboration, this band has a sound.”

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For more information, email clapthehousesdark@gmail.com or call Jon Davis at (505) 310-0936.​

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Deeper Origins

Clap the Houses Dark music got its start with words-and-music compositions Greg explored with the drummer and producer Bart van der Zeeuw (formerly of K’s Choice) in California, over a period of years. Bart brought not only top-tier drumming but a recording and arrangement approach to Greg’s in-process charts. An early, rough, two-vocalist version of “Carry Them With You” emerged, Bart doing one voice–as well as the drums–and Greg doing the other.

Bart’s arranging and producing ideas are influences in “You Could Show Me How” and in “Number Them Clouds” as well. Greg says, “Bart’s sensibility is just part of how I hear things now. To whatever extent I’m able to hear a composition globally, a lot of that comes from Bart. He was there for about a decade of all sorts of music we worked on, regular songs as well as words-and-music compositions. He’s in there in new pieces, too–even when he’s not in there.”

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Deeper Roots

The inspiration to join poetic language and music got its start about 20 years ago when Greg was a faculty member for Christine Lysnewycz Kruk Holbert’s Lost Horse Writers’ Conference–which was also a music conference that featured Glen Moore of the jazz group Oregon and the legendary jazz bassist Ron Carter. Greg says the familiar, concert-going joy at seeing the huge mixer board when he first walked into the venue, the pleasure of hearing and doing readings as musicians improvised, and the thrill of meeting Carter and hearing him in concert–has lasted. “From that point on, I’ve worked on ways for literary language and music to work closely together, the intricacy and nuance of phrases, the intricacy and joy of music, composed into one thing, developed and honed by a band–something rich to listen to at home, something that comes alive in performance. Now, Tommy Archuleta, Mikey Chavez, Jon Davis, Jon Lucero, and Jon Trujillo are actually making this happen.”

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