Clerel, a Cameroonian-born Canadian artist featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and who is set to play at this year’s SXSW festival, innervated the ears and hearts of an intimate Burlington audience with a set of stripped-back soul-infused ballads during his first live performance of the year. The soul singer sat down to speak with me backstage where he contemplated playing live versus recording in studio, teased the release of his next EP, and got both philosophical and personal about where soul music is today and what the genre means to him.
A dimly lit theatre room with around 20 black-tablecloth-draped round tables that are kept vigil by a petite one-row mezzanine awakens with polite applause as Clerel Djamen, stage name being the first-given, saunters his way over to a small chair with his guitar casually straddled to his shoulder as if it’s a daily-used tote bag. The chair is behind a slender mic stand and is coadjacent to a small amp on the right.
When Clerel sits down, a lone spotlight makes him glow; he’s wearing a conservatively decorated white Hawaiian shirt, lustrous dull-gold dress pants with hounds-tooth patterning and shiny black dress shoes.
After a casual introduction, he conveys some nostalgic sentiments about the city of Burlington, mentioning a lost love of his from the city whom he musingly quips may be present tonight; “or not,” he adds coyly after a pregnant pause, which is received with gentle laughter. There’s no sense of performative elevation in the conversational prelude, nor is there a sense of the musician hitting beats from some script with what he talks about and how he talks about it to his audience. Despite this, he comes off like the filmic cliché of the enigmatic, sagacious guy at the bar whom one could spend all night hearing spin yarns.
But as he segues conversation into his first song, the bonhomie atmosphere immediately turns to disarming and raw emotion. All of a sudden, shoulders begin to drop, heads lightly angle themselves in attentive awe, and dimples disappear as faces relax and begin to absorb. We the audience are literally whipped into emotional vulnerability as the effects of the young musician’s soul-ballads permeate the venue space, leaving no escapees.
Clerel’s main musical inspiration is love, he tells us again and again in the conversational interstices between the setlist — and the raw lulling effect his music has on the audience seems to add as a corollary: to resist love is to not be human.
So tightly woven into the raison d’être of Clerel’s career as a musician is the epiphanic experience he had when he attended the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis while he was a student. During his evening performance on Jan. 23 at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre (BPAC), his first live performance since 2024, Clerel carved out a few minutes to tell the story to the nearly sold-out audience.
It starts with a university trip to Memphis that led a young and collegiate Djamen, who had recently moved to the States with his family from their native Cameroon, to the Stax Museum, as it was one of the trip’s excursion sites. In the museum, Djamen was steeped in the history, legacy and distinct sound of soul music — specifically the sound of seminal Stax Records greats like Ottis Reddings, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, Mavis Staples and so on — alongside getting a crash course in the genre’s genealogical connection to the pre- and post-Civil Rights experience of Black Americans, which evoked resonations with the artist’s own identity as a Black American.
From an early age, Djamen had an attraction to melody, as he would sing and enjoy listening to French radio and Cameroonian music as a child. After learning guitar through a friend in university and finding solace in playing alone in his dorm, the eye-opening experience at the Stax Museum galvanized in him a sense of purpose and artistic inspiration that unified what were beforehand disparate musical talents and tastes.
So, after successfully giving live music a try at some open mics in Montreal, it became clear that soul music and not chemistry, which he graduated with a degree in, was his life’s calling.
Since then, Clerel has released two EPs (with a third on the way), music videos, multiple singles and was even featured in a segment on Stephen Colbert’s CBS talk program The Late Show only a few years ago.
Despite his growing discography, Clerel tells me in his dressing room backstage that he still considers himself a live musician over a studio one:
“I’m definitely more a live musician. I think [as a] recording artist, I’m still catching up… but I like the spontaneity of being live. [There,] you’re a co-creator of the moment, you and the audience, y’know.”
Seeing Clerel live is certainly a different listening experience than hearing his studio releases. Take the single from his latest EP Kaleidoscope, “23 Special,” which was recently adapted to a music video on the artist’s YouTube page. While the studio version of the track is quite done up with layers of jazzy melodic instrumentation atop a mainstream-R&B sounding percussive loop that is reminiscent of Drake’s more dancehall-inspired music, the live rendition he performed at the BPAC sounded like an almost entirely different song. With the obvious instrumental limitations and Clerel’s embrace of the spontaneity of performing live, the song ended up sounding incredibly stripped-back and intimate, which was in stark contrast to the bubbly and polished mixing of the studio version. Live, the song sounded as though the flirty lyrics of Teddy Pendergrass were combined with the warm, plucky acoustic solitude of a Nick Drake instrumental.
Clerel also teased new music from what will be his third EP, titled Stranger, which he said will probably release sometime this year. He played a wonderfully simple but heartfelt eponymous cut from the eventual project alongside one other track slated to be in the EP during his set.
Clerel explained that with his third project, he’s trying a little harder to workshop new songs in a live setting to see how that medium contributes to their progression. This way, he told me, he can make the aspects of live music he enjoys a prominent part of the recursive process of writing for the studio version of songs:
“Now I do more of that [approach], because in the past I realize like, I’ll come in with the song as recorded a certain way, but when it comes to playing it live, I obviously have to change it. So I’m trying to take some of that live energy and bring it back to the recording process.”
But seeing Clerel perform doesn’t mean you’re only going to hear his music. In keeping with his initial mesmerisation by and subsequent tutelage from the early greats of soul, he sprinkled covers of multiple classic songs from the genre during his BPAC set.
These covers garnered near-immediate erupting applauses from the audience the moment the notable melodies of classic songs like “A Change Is Gonna Come” by the oft-referred King of Soul, Sam Cooke, and “Cruisin’” by R&B and soul legend Smokey Robinson became recognizable. These honorific applauses were sometimes endearingly delayed, however, as it would take the audience a good number of seconds after Clerel would start for the cognitive lag in recognizing what song was being played to pass — the result, understandably so, of Clerel’s renditions being quite minimalist due to his setup.
Clerel’s respect for the genre, though, doesn’t mean he’s nostalgic to the point of innovative stagnation in his own work, as the singer integrates Cameroonian influences as well as mainstream genres like hip hop and pop into his sound. At the same time, he keeps the foundational formulas of soul and soul-adjacent genres close to his creative process.
Clerel’s ability to have these ostensibly opposite creative approaches works because his definition of what gives soul music its identity is an ethos rather than anything tantamount to a set of specific aesthetic criteria.
In 2014, Greg Kot published an op-ed in BBC declaring “the death of soul music” with the passing of genre-legend Bobby Womack. In his piece, Kot notes that the largest names in the genre for the modern age — John Legend, Alicia Keys, etc. — were just as, if not more, influenced by the highly polished genre-crossing sounds of Prince and Michael Jackson, as well as mainstream genres like hip hop, as they were by those of the golden age of soul. Thus, Kot declares snootily, the genre is basically “dead” in terms of progression and cultural significance.
“I think that’s a great way to sell an article,” Clerel replied when I asked how he felt about Kot’s provocative thesis. “I think it’s just time. Obviously, there was an era for like ‘60s and ‘70s soul, and the consciousness [of it] with the Black American experience then. Today some of those things are still in play, but the eras are different… The soul music of today necessarily has to be different.”
As far as Clerel’s concerned though, soul comes down to one essential aspect: being real.
“To me that’s what it is, it’s just like you being real at the end of the day. All real music is soul music in a way,” Clerel said while looking off to the side of the dressing room with a contented smile.
Clerel’s ethos-based perspective on the genre is the reason he believes soul is still very much alive today, just not in the traditional sense. After listing various musical inspirations he feels tap into what he sees as the core philosophical aspect of soul, from traditional African genres to notable names in mainstream Western music, him and I shared a moment of agreed admiration for the early work of Kanye West. He went on to cite West’s critically lauded debut LP from 2004, The College Dropout, as an example of music that embodies the ethos of realness that he argues is integral to soul, saying West was “touching something pure” on that record.
Even with the desire for neat, taxonomy-friendly technical definitions that comes instinctively with being an arts critic, it was hard not to be swayed by Clerel’s idiosyncratic definition of soul music.
Beyond the obvious nod to soul in Kanye West’s signature production chops of sped-up soul vocal samples (a style in hip hop called “chipmunk soul,” which the Chicago MC did the most to make recognizable the world over), the subject matter on both West’s debut and for the most part on his sophomore LP, Late Registration, display a pristine vulnerability and introspective complexity that he would never capture to the same degree on wax again. The internally crystalline aura of early Kanye unfortunately began to fade after the vain adulterations of fame and riches came into the picture, already starting to show their influence on the rapper’s artistic inspirations by his third LP, Graduation (compare “Flashing Lights” from Graduation to “Jesus Walks” from Dropout).
It might seem a far cry, but Clerel singling out Dropout-era Kanye as an instantiation of what soul means left me asking: Is there not the same artistic calculus going on between Kanye’s early music and what made the greatest soul records great? In many ways, the greatness of both arise out of the passionate need to make what’s authentically being felt inside come out even, or rather, especially when the inspiration for such expression is essentially unsexy, painful, monotonous or banal.
The famous Dropout song “Through the Wire” is a cut West wrote and performed in the hospital after breaking his jaw in a car accident and getting it sewn shut (hence the title). West would go on to turn the painful boredom of being in the hospital into the inspiration for what’s now one of hip hop’s most beloved songs, and precisely due to the raw personability of it. The song’s opening lines — literally mumbled because of West’s sewn jaw — emphatically state: “I’ll spit it through the wire, man / There’s too much stuff on my heart right now, man,” which is followed up by charming lyrics about his liquid hospital diet: Boost for breakfast and Ensure for dessert, which, he emphasizes, “could drive a sane man berserk.”
Easily one of the most famous soul songs ever recorded is Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” a song where the subject matter’s somewhat bluesy central muse was an actual experience Redding had sitting at a friend’s dock in San Francisco. And despite many of the lyrics and the chorus of the song seemingly acknowledging how utterly insignificant and pedestrian this experience is in isolation (“I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay / Watchin’ the tide roll away, ohh / I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay / Wastin’ time”), the lyrics progressively reveal how this simple act of non-productively observing the passage of time induces Redding to think about the complex feelings of loneliness and alienation that come from his extended sojourn away from his home state of Georgia. The more introspective lyrics’ contrasting character and relative scarcity when compared to their more monotonous counterparts makes them cut that much deeper: “Sittin’ here resting my bones / And this loneliness won’t leave me alone / Two thousand miles I roamed / Just to make this dock my home.”
Likewise, Kanye’s time healing his jaw at the hospital should have been nothing but a creative drought, a period of drudgingly waiting for time to pass. But he had a different MO on Dropout, a uniquely soul-inspired one that the final two stanzas of the song are coincidentally revealing of: “I’m a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph / Make music that’s fire, spit my soul through the wire.”
With his intuitive insight into soul’s trans-genre influence, one can also start to understand why Clerel self-identifies as a live musician and, not only why he is so natural on stage when interacting with audiences, but also why his live music is so disarming while being maximally emotionally potent: all of these things are unavoidably immediate and real — they involve instantaneous human feedback making the listener’s authentic reactions to the performance just about impossible to hide.
At the end of some of the more emotional tracks in the two-hour performance, Clerel had to wipe away tears that had no whiff of contrivance to them. Rather, they appeared more like the necessary emotional collateral of tapping into the realness he holds to be sacrosanct to making music that’s pure.
As the musician wished everyone a good night after his final song of the set, the Ontario audience rose to their feet without hesitation in a jubilant applause — Clerel had won their hearts by baring his.