Diane Cluck is one of those singer songwriters I keep coming back to and each time I discover something new.
Her songs have a wonderfully slippery quality that you can never quite get hold of and at the same time they take you to a place that feels special and real.
Perhaps her gift is down to the fact that she doesn’t force the songs but waits for the muse to come.
She started out performing at an open mic nights at the Sidewalk cafe in the East Village, New York and since 2000 she has released five albums but no new material since 2005’s ‘Countless Times’.
She seems happy to maintain a low profile so when not singing spends her time resting or gardening and also works in a herb shop and restaurant in Georgia.
An early song ‘Monte Carlo’ appeared on an ‘Anti-Folk’ compilation, a genre she’s linked to mainly through tours/collaborations with Jeffrey Lewis and Herman Dune.
Anti-Folk is one of the dumbest labels, supposedly intended to connect artists who want to distant themselves from what Elliot Smith called the “boring, drippy stuff” of traditional Folk music. It’s a dumb name because these artists are, whether they like it or not, actually following a strong Folk tradition by writing personal and emotionally charged reflections on the world around them. Folk is not just outdated stuff about maidens in distress or bonnie wee laddies. By extending the boundaries of an existing genre doesn’t mean you reject what went before. When Punk made a big thing of wiping the slate clean, this didn’t mean it was against all older rock music, merely that it was anti-lameness and self indulgence.
More positively, Cluck has also been claimed by Devendra Banhart’s extended nu-folk family. He included a song of hers (‘Heat From Every Corner’) on the influential ‘Golden Apples of the Sun’ compilation for Arthur Magazine back in 2004 and was quoted as saying that she was his favourite female singer in New York.
I like Diane Cluck’s songs because they manage to sound assertive yet fragile – she communicates self doubt without straying into the clichéd ‘oh woe is me’ territory. One of my favourite songs is called ‘Battlefield Nurse’ from 2001’s ‘Macy’s Day Bird’ which includes the great lines : “she’s got eyes like a battlefield nurse / the kind that keep you calm when all around you things are getting worse”
If you don’t know her stuff I’d recommend correcting this immediately.
