A Longing for Meaning

Eef Barzelay knows he’s had it easy. The singer-guitarist for the band Clem Snide didn’t grow up during the Great Depression or serve in Vietnam, nor does he live in Afghanistan. He comes from suburban New Jersey, which might seem an unlikely birthplace for Clem Snide’s wistful, quietly emotional country rock.

But as Neil Young once sang, “My problems may be meaningless, but that don’t make them go away.” So Barzelay has found a personal language that’s equal parts clever and heartbreaking, singing sadly of feeling like Elvis Presley’s “long lost twin” or turning a banal line of advertising, “Calgon, take me away,” into something impossibly sad and evocative. Elsewhere, he sings in biblical proportions of actor Corey Feldman and mythologizes his suburban roots on “Joan Jett of Arc,” a remembrance of first love and first sex.

But what is sometimes interpreted as simple irony is actually a singer-songwriter seeking common points of reference.

“That’s kind of the language that we have, commercials,” says Barzelay, 31, whose band plays tonight at the Knitting Factory Hollywood. “Ultimately, I’m trying to make my life more meaningful, even though it could be construed as relatively meaningless. I didn’t grow up in the ghetto. I don’t have any real story. But I like the idea of taking insignificant or superficial things and trying to make them meaningful.

“I like to get under people’s skin, if I can,” he adds. “It’s warm in there.”

That balance of dry humor and real longing can be found on the band’s most recent album, “The Ghost of Fashion.” Clem Snide’s sound is rooted in the alt-country movement, but its use of strings, horns and tape loops results in a recording often as expansive as Wilco and other musical freethinkers.

The musical depth helps give the unlikely lyrical content layers of feeling. It was enough that the album’s Stones-like rocker “Moment in the Sun” was adopted as the theme to the television show “Ed.”

Subsequent appearances on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and continued critical support have translated into accelerating attention for the band. After a decade of struggle and obscurity, Barzelay says it has been difficult to ignore the recent change in fortunes. That much was clear at a recent show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom.

“For the first time, I noticed younger people, like kids, really into it,” says Barzelay. “First you play for jaded hipsters, and if you can transcend the jaded hipster crowd and break into the young college kids--they’re the ones that buy records and buy T-shirts. Jaded hipsters always seem to be on the [guest] list, somehow.”

Clem Snide began after Barzelay dropped out of the prestigious Berklee School of Music, where he studied jazz guitar. Rather than improvising over jazz standards, he felt more inclined to draw on his love for Hank Williams and Dinosaur Jr.

With drummer Eric Paull and bassist Jason Glasser, he formed Clem Snide, taking the band’s name (a la Steely Dan) from a character in a William Burroughs novel, “Cities of the Red Night.” After playing “some crazy music” in Boston for about five years, Barzelay relocated to New York to attend art school while the band went on hiatus.

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Clem Snide took shape again in the late ‘90s after Glasser switched to cello and began experimenting with tape loops and other sounds that would eventually add rich layers to the band’s character.

“Everyone in this band is fearless and adventurous, musically, and always wanting to see how far we can take something,” says Barzelay.

The band soon released an album, “You Were a Diamond,” that earned some favorable press, a following on the Northeast club circuit and about 1,000 sales.

A short-lived deal with Sire Records led to “Your Favorite Music” (1998), now available again on the indie label SpinART, which released “The Ghost of Fashion” last June.

The band--which now also includes multi-instrumentalist Pete Fitzpatrick--will break from touring this summer while Barzelay and his wife await the birth of their first child.

Then Clem Snide returns to the studio to make the “married with kids record” that Barzelay says he wrote a year ago. While “The Ghost of Fashion” represents a darker collection of “bad love songs, the ones about love of self and lust and vanity,” the sequel should be sweeter, somehow, he promises.

They are the “selfless, sweet kind of songs written mostly for the wife,” he explains.

But the sound and wit should stay the same, he insists. “I kind of get off on the irony being a Jewish kid from New Jersey who plays country music,” says Barzelay. “I think that’s cool.”

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Clem Snide, with Josh Rouse and Ill Lit, Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, today at 8 p.m. $12. (323) 463-0204.