I never lived in New York, but growing up about 120 miles from the city, within TV antenna range of WPIX, Channel 11, I absorbed a lot of its culture as a kid. Crazy Eddie’s madcap commercials, The Honeymooners marathons on New Year’s Eve, ads for “beautiful Mount Airy Lodge” wooing New Yorkers to the Poconos, and those for “Cats at the Winter Garden!” enticing us to catch a bus to the city. It was like living in a Lower East Side walk-up, but without the 10,000 steps and exorbitant rent.
Brian Dunne’s terrific new album Clams Casino possesses that same kind of teleportation magic, albeit with less nostalgia and more melancholy. Over 10 songs, the Brooklyn singer-songwriter paints a vivid picture of what it’s like to eke out an existence as a 30-something artist in New York today: Joys are hard-won and fleeting, self-doubt rears its head hourly, and the struggle to constantly achieve, or perform achievement on social media, looms like a Scooby-Doo villain’s shadow.
Dunne captures all of that in the title track, a bouncy, bittersweet singalong that equates success with a baked seafood dish. “I’m just trying to have a good life/Clams casino on a Sunday night,” he sings, full of simple aspiration.
It’s a song about class, Dunne explains when asked why he’d write an homage to breadcrumbs, bacon, and bivalves. “It’s about where I’m from and where I hope to go, and all the shame and pride that comes with trying to outrun those circumstances,” he says. “I grew up in a super working-class family and I wear that as a badge of honor, but also, I’ve got serious delusions of grandeur and I don’t really know how to reconcile those two things.”
His reality — like having to buy his mattress secondhand — is always bringing him back to earth. “Why’s it so hard to have a good thing?” Dunne wonders throughout “Clam Casino.”
In lesser hands, such a question, especially from a young white male who plays guitar for a living, could come off as whining. But Dunne’s voice, lilting and keening, is rich with empathy. He knows it’s hard out there for everyone, and in the song’s final verse points the finger back at himself: “She said, ‘All you do is bitch and moan… You really don’t have it half bad.’”
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That kind of self-awareness is a hallmark of Dunne’s writing on Clams Casino. In the deceptively ebullient “Play the Hits,” he acknowledges he’s aging out of the competitive Brooklyn arts scene. “All the kids down here/They all remind you of you/They’re a little big younger with a little bit more hunger,” he sings, before capping the verse with a sharp, self-inflicted wound — “And they look good in leather too.”
In the devastating “I Watched the Light,” about being ground down to the point where any glimmer is extinguished, he begins with an anecdote of someone turning tail. “Heard you were leaving, moving to Cleveland/Said it’s not as bad as it looks, or sounds/’Cause after a while, man, it’s all Ohio, man,” he rationalizes. When Dunne performed the song earlier this year for a room full of tourists at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, he apologized to anyone visiting from Ohio.
He needn’t have worried. “I Watched the Light,” like so many of the best songs on Clams Casino, establishes this as an album about the good and bad of New York — not Cleveland, nor anywhere else — without overtly saying so. In “Play the Hits,” he writes about the upheaval of vacating a one-bedroom apartment. “Rockland County,” meanwhile, fantasizes about the docility and ease of suburban life, where “you and I can live like townies” with farmers markets, supersized Targets, and abundant free parking. Dunne doesn’t declare it, but it’s clear he’s fleeing the city.
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Paul Simon, another New York songwriter, was also expert at making his home part of the narrative without spelling it out. It’s hard to hear Simon sing, “I met my old lover on the street last night” in “Still Crazy After All These Years” and picture the encounter happening anywhere but on a Manhattan block. That’s the same trick Dunne pulls off with Clams Casino.
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But Dunne, who is also a member of the cheeky band of songwriters known as Fantastic Cat, isn’t averse to dropping a pin to share his exact location. He fills “Max’s Kansas City” with a bevy of New York identifiers, from the defunct rock club of the title to a Lou Reed namecheck, as he wanders the downtown streets on an “endless search for meaning.”
After consuming “half a Xanax and an English tea,” he has a revelation, not that everything is going to be all right in his city, or in this quickly deteriorating world, but that he’s “got time to kill” to see how it ends. And that may be even more satisfying than a clam appetizer.
