[Transcript edited for clarity]

Absent Sounds: Okay. I had a question about the way that we ingest music now, especially with content and the idea of short attention spans. When it comes to working on an album, does it change the way you approach it when you know the listener may not be engaging with it or consuming it the way you originally created it?

Clarke Sonderman: A little bit. I don't know enough about that side of things to worry about it too much, because I never got on streaming. It's not like I had to get off. I was so protective of my MP3 library that I just never made the jump. I can understand from the backend perspective how playlisting works, and my one song "Blur" became successful because of playlisting. So I've seen that side of the coin, but it doesn't really factor into the creative process for me. It's more just another thing to dread while you're making an album. It messes with your head in that way, but it doesn't change how I approach anything.

Absent Sounds: Also, we were watching your Subway takes, and I was like, you people in the comments are dumb. I agree with you.

Clarke Sonderman: I could have been more precise with my wording.

Absent Sounds: No, I think it's better to be really absurd. That's when you want comments. That's the engagement. It's rage baiting. But do you think it's the audience's responsibility to change the way they engage with music? Or is some of the onus on the artists too?

Clarke Sonderman: I think it's both. Most artists play the audience role too, in their own capacity. I think it's more about whether you're creating or just engaging with other people's work, and the level of respect we treat music and any creative work with. Though respect isn't quite the right word, because it's more than that. Music demands to be taken seriously, or something like that. I think it's just better for you as a person if you're not always going for the path of least resistance when it's presented to you over and over again. I mentioned it in that video: don't order delivery just because it's available to you. Don't ask AI something that would take you thirty seconds longer to Google. I don't use AI at all either. We need to push back against the convenience of everything, for ourselves, not even for societal or political reasons. We're going to turn into the people at the end of WALL-E. Maybe we already are, which is my concern.

Absent Sounds: Every time I take the escalator, I just start thinking about how this is the epitome of human laziness.

Clarke Sonderman: Totally. And the people in those chairs in WALL-E seemed pretty happy. I don't think they are at the end of the day, but there are days where I'm like, that looks nice.

Absent Sounds: What does that mean for you as a musician then? How do you avoid the path of least resistance when you're making something like an album?

Clarke Sonderman: That's a really good question. It's a really hard thing, but a really important thing, to try your hardest to detach the idea of a listener from the creative process and trust your own taste rather than what you project other people's tastes are. It's a really scary thing, but that's the most pivotal part of the process for me. When I'm writing rather than recording, I rely a lot on asking friends for advice on arrangements or mixing or production. But when I was writing Visiting the Well, I had to set a rule in order to feel sane, given the circumstances leading into that album. I've carried it with me: when I'm writing, I'm not allowed to send anyone a draft for feedback until six months after I've written the song. Which is part of why it takes me so long to put out albums. It should not have been six years between them. Or five. I'm trying to work on that, and I'll shorten the timeframe, but I like having a rule for how long you have to sit with the writing and refine it before you start asking for opinions.

Absent Sounds: I love that. I think there's an impulse to need to know if you're going in the right direction. There's something about trusting your own vision, or the impulse you had in the first place to do something the way you did.

Clarke Sonderman: Totally. And even if you don't trust your own vision, being forced to sit with it can be really nice. You get to say, okay, that's actually what I don't like about it, rather than letting someone else point that out. Defensiveness always comes into play, whether you want it to or not. It's nice to shrink your world down as much as you expand it.

Absent Sounds: Talking about sitting in it, we were wondering about sitting in fear. Recently I've been sitting with a great deal of existential fear, or a fear of hope, which I think is a tension that runs through your music, or at least between the previous record and this one, the past five years. The way I describe it is, I had this idea that I wouldn't make it this far. I didn't think my life would last this long. It's hard to detach from that backdoor theory, from the exit, and look forward. I'm scared to enjoy living. And it feels like your music, or at least this last record, which for those who aren't sure is called Leave It in the Sand, was released two months ago.

Clarke Sonderman: Yeah.

Absent Sounds: I love how you choose to look that way.

Clarke Sonderman: Thanks. I'm glad you used the word "choose," because the deliberateness of it was what I was trying to convey the most. To zoom all the way out, I wrote my first record in the very immediate aftermath of losing a partner to cancer. It was very diaristic, gut check, knee-jerk songwriting. I'm very proud of that work, but it's the double-edged sword of making very personal work and then putting it out there. It's not getting certified gold anytime soon, but it was more successful than I expected. Even just on the digital side, seeing how many people were listening to this music, when years later I was no longer in the heartbroken state I was in when I wrote that album. I felt a responsibility to people who were resonating with it. I don't want to call it my "it gets better" album, but I've also, as a listener, resonated with a lot of horrifically sad music in my time, so I felt a responsibility to convey at least my path out of that a little bit. A lot of it is a deliberate choice. As trite as it is, it's the serenity prayer of it all: focusing on what you do have control over and what you don't. It's also trying to invert that anxiety spiral you're talking about, especially these days in the political climate. It's worse for me living in the States than in Canada, but globally it's pretty bad. It's so easy to fixate on what if the worst thing happens, and I have to force myself into, well, what if the best thing happens? It's just as likely a lot of the time. More than anything, it's an album about self-integration. Moving on from something difficult doesn't mean you're letting it go. It means you're allowing things to become whole with themselves.

Absent Sounds: I've always struggled with the phrase "moving on." I don't want to move on from certain things. But the idea of moving forward has always been helpful for me to sit with. I love that. Before we go into the weeds of the record, I want to ask one more question about the theme. Swimming and water felt so poignant, and very visceral too. What is it about water and swimming that kept coming up for you here?

Clarke Sonderman: Part of it is deliberate, part of it is circumstantial. Right around the time I started writing most of these songs, I met my husband and we started splitting our time between New York and Fire Island, which is a remote community way off the coast of Long Island, if you know the geography at all. We go to a place called the Fire Island Pines, which is a historically gay community. I love the contradictions of the place, because we primarily go out in the off season, October through April, when it's cold. But during the summer and the high season, which is what people associate it with, it's a party community, massive club nights all the time. Everyone's in a Speedo every day of the week. That tension started to fascinate me, and then the physical space of it started to fascinate me. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, if you're listening, that even though it's over forty miles long, it's never more than a quarter mile wide. So it's really just a sandbar sticking out in the middle of the ocean, which seems absurd for people to have built houses on, let alone full communities. It's constantly eroding, and the state government of New York has to do these massive beach restoration projects. It felt like the perfect expression of what I was trying to say about loving and appreciating the delicateness of life. And it's just so beautiful, and I love swimming in the ocean there, so it seeped in that way too.

Absent Sounds: I love the physical places this album existed in. And that's what the cover is as well.

Clarke Sonderman: It's an imagination of it, but it's based on a sunset photo I took on that beach, and then the painter Rivka Ravede added the figures in and started rearranging. That's meant to be my dog, up in the upper right. I have a little dog named Findley.

Absent Sounds: Hi, Findley. As we dive into the record now, the opening track immediately feels so lush. The strings are arranged beautifully, and like the water, it's a calming force, but for a lot of people the water is so terrifying. Honest and scary. Vast and open.

Clarke Sonderman: Thank you. For the string arrangements, I worked with two violinists on this record. Mari Rubio, who goes by moreease, and Zachary Paul, who does his own work and also plays in Chanel Beads and a few other bands in New York.

Absent Sounds: I was just listening to Chanel Beads on the way here, actually.

Clarke Sonderman: They're the best. And for whatever reason, it worked out that the songs Zachary played violin on were all in the key of D. So when I was scheming on an intro, I just stacked his parts from the rest of the album, layered over each other. They weren't arranged for an intro specifically. Then I started messing around with sound and played guitar over it. That was the only song on the album I produced myself. I worked with a producer for the rest of it, and that one was just me having fun on my laptop. It's kind of fun to have found a way to set the stage at the end, once everything else is in place. The strings were the last thing layered in, so taking elements from the album at the end of the process was fun.

Absent Sounds: You mentioned the end of the process, but it's interesting, because when we go into the second track, "Everything I Need," with Melody English, you also recorded that back in 2023. Does the meaning change for you when something is finished at a certain time and then you return to it? Does it change your relationship to that song?

Clarke Sonderman: Not really. To me it's more like an endorsement of the idea that I was right about what I was saying when I first wrote it. The final song, "Thank You," was the first song I wrote of this batch, and "Everything I Need" came shortly afterwards. So more than changing the meaning, it felt like writing the rest of the album and still returning to that one as a central theme of what I was trying to say. It felt like an endorsement that I was on the right path the whole time. I often think a lot of my favourite songwriters have one perfect song in their heart that they can never get out in exactly the right iteration, so they keep trying. I like that idea as a thread throughout people's songwriting practices. It's like, well, if I keep trying to say this thing, then it's probably something worth saying.

Absent Sounds: Do you ever think you can achieve that perfect song? It might not even be a useful thing to try to do.

Clarke Sonderman: No, I think that's the whole fun of it. Do y'all like Bill Callahan? He has a song called "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" that I would recommend, which is sort of about this. He has a dream of the perfect song, the perfect expression of everything he's trying to say. Then he writes the lyrics down after he wakes up, but they're gibberish, because he was still half asleep when he wrote them. That's the slipperiness I like exploring with that idea. It's called "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" because in the chorus he's reading the gibberish he wrote.

Absent Sounds: That's amazing. So genius. After this, that's my next hole to go down. I think you also have another track where it feels like you're talking about dream spaces too. "Singing in My Sleep." I started to wonder about deciphering what's happening between your present self and those unformed hauntings, the remnants of yourself that you might be trying to reach. That language between, and the reaching. Maybe it's not exactly what you're talking about here, but that's what I was reflecting on while listening. I'm not sure if there's any connection for you.

Clarke Sonderman: A little bit. It's funny, I wrote that song not too long after I met my now husband. The concept was just that there's one melody he sings to himself when he's walking around the house. I've asked him about it a couple of times, and it's just the thing he's always hummed when he felt like humming, rather than being from a song he likes. I thought it was such a beautiful concept that people have certain melodies in their head that don't necessarily exist. That's where the core concept came from: trying to access that very internal part of someone else in a romantic relationship, and getting that person's melody stuck in my head even though it doesn't exist.

Absent Sounds: The part where she speaks in another language in her sleep is what it makes me think of, immediately.

Clarke Sonderman: Totally. It's like the subconscious test. I only speak English because I went to American public school. Just kidding, I can speak a little Spanish, but not really. I find that so fascinating. I've met a couple of people who studied another language and knew they'd gotten it when they had their first dream in that language. I don't think about the subconscious too much, because frankly it scares me. It's something I can spin out on if I spend time thinking about it. But it does fascinate me as a testing ground of personal truth.

Absent Sounds: We would love for you to take us back to Fire Island once more. You've given us such a beautiful picture already, but what are we smelling when we first get off the ferry? How do we get there? Take us to that place.

Clarke Sonderman: Okay. In our heads, you go to Penn Station or Jamaica or Atlantic Terminal, one of the big train stations in New York, and then you take the Long Island Rail Road out. If you time it right, there's only one transfer. Sometimes there's a couple. Then you get off and take a shuttle to the ferry, which is six dollars cash, and they get really mad at you if you don't have exact change. Then you ride the ferry across. My experience of riding the ferry to Fire Island is that even if I'm working from the commute or stressed out about other stuff, my shoulders just always drop once you get on the water. It's a bit like a portal. And I forgot to mention the most critical thing about Fire Island, which is that there are no cars. It's only walkways, and people have delivery carts or accessibility carts, little powered hand carts that they drive around. But for the most part it's walking. They're all very compact communities, so it feels very summer-campish. It feels like a fake world in a way, but I really love it.

Absent Sounds: There's a line where you ask for something like a sign. We love that, because we draw ourselves toward talismans and anything that seems like it's saying something. I don't really find meanings, but I love wondering what they mean. What's a sign for you that will always make you think there's something meant to be found there?

Clarke Sonderman: It was meant to be a joke, a little bit, looking for signs and then seeing literal signs around, like "Smile, you're on camera." That song is more about the fear cycles we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, worrying about how much worse things could get. I hate to say this because it's corny to make political music, inherently, but that's my most political song. It's meant to be a salve to myself when I'm worried about the direction of the world, and to poke fun a little at some of the ridiculous twenty-first century indulgences we have. In the second chorus, I mention missing the last connection. I meant the New York Times Connections game. And going to sleep in Casper blue is the mattress brand, all influencer-ised. That's sort of what I was going for. But then it's holding onto genuine moments of connection as the currency that still matters, the thing that still propels people through life. And that doesn't just have to be romantic. When I was doing political work, I found that socially, and I found it through music. It's so hard to talk about big picture ideas like that in a way that doesn't sound like a greeting card, but it really is about connecting with people. That's what makes it worth it. I went to the Evergreen State College, which is a very freewheeling hippie school, and I was split between their degree tracks of Marxist political economy and cybernetic music composition. It sounds totally fake, but those are set paths. I feel like I'm trained up a bit as a Marxist, and the materialist lens is what I try to view things through. I feel fortunate that my day job incorporates a lot of political work. I've worked with the Working Families Party and Indivisible and a bunch of other really great left-wing orgs in the States. In the context of that song, what I was writing about is a feeling I took from one of my Marxist professors in college, which is that you're setting yourself up to be really let down if you think the political work you're doing is creating a world you're actually going to live in. It's more that you're placing yourself in a noble lineage, and fighting for justice, for these profoundly universal ideas, is a pseudo-religious thing. It's a practice that gives life meaning. That's become my view of political action. Maybe it sounds like a cop out, because don't get me wrong, I do want to win materially. Especially in America right now, I want the left to win and be in power. But you can't get crushed at every defeat. You have to view it as a practice as much as a direct fight. That's my soapbox.

Absent Sounds: Absolutely. I love that. We'll go to the next track, which is "Face of God."

Clarke Sonderman: Such a crazy name for a song. For me it was about the very literal fear of riptides, and the through line of swimming and water throughout the album. It's the risk and the fear associated with it. I liked the idea of writing a more tranquil song about accepting something bad that's happening to you, because getting pulled out in a riptide is obviously a really bad thing. To me, I don't really know what that song is about, but I think it's about accepting where you either took yourself or have been taken, and kind of making it work.

Absent Sounds: It's so fitting, because this morning I sent you a link to an Irish Times article that came out yesterday, I believe. It was about a migrant ship out of The Gambia. Some of the people were from Senegal, Cameroon, a few different places along the coast of West Africa. They were going that way because if they try to go up through North Africa, they know they'll be sent back.

Clarke Sonderman: Because of interception routes.

Absent Sounds: Exactly.

Clarke Sonderman: There's a specific path.

Absent Sounds: Yeah. So now they're going an even longer way around. I was talking to my friend about whether it's worth it. There were about three hundred people on the ship, and only thirty-five made it. The man in the article talked about how by day thirteen people started dying, and they were throwing people overboard. It was pretty hard to read.

Clarke Sonderman: Yeah.

Absent Sounds: I was really struggling with that idea of putting yourself into the ocean, or into whatever that riptide might be, of reaching for something. In a way, letting yourself be carried by the ocean. Do I accept where I am, or do I push toward something else?

Clarke Sonderman: Totally. Or be carried by fear. The stories surrounding those voyages are so heartbreaking, but in terms of is it worth it, in situations of human desperation like that, I don't know what other choice you have. I can't imagine that people getting on those boats don't know the risks. If you're backed into a corner, who knows if it would be better staying versus going. It's just heartbreaking.

Absent Sounds: I wasn't going to say something as heavy as that.

Clarke Sonderman: I'm sorry.

Absent Sounds: No, it's okay.

Clarke Sonderman: But it's real. If I'm writing about the ocean or thinking about it, it's not all just fun days at the beach. It is the current that moves through the world in all of its capacity.

Absent Sounds: Track number six, "Everything." I love how this feels tied to another track, "Everything I See." So what lies between those two? If you could tell us what everything is?

Clarke Sonderman: Part of it is that after I wrote two songs with the word "everything" in the title, I thought it was kind of funny and figured, why not keep going? But it's funny you fixate on those two. If I'm talking about offering a true follow-up to Visiting the Well, those were two songs where I took the guitar parts from songs on Visiting the Well and wrote a much more optimistic song with them. "Everything" is the same chord progression, just rearranged, as "The Maze," which is the closing track on Visiting the Well. It's another song I don't really know what it's about.

Absent Sounds: I love how you leave it. You're not forcing something.

Clarke Sonderman: Yeah. To me it's almost a little bit dismissive, but that song was me zooming out of the craziness and vapidity of life in New York. This is all happening and it all works out. We don't need to freak out about the party or the show. It's all happening, and it's always all been happening. And then "Everything I See" is kind of the thesis of the album to me, in terms of recovery from grief. Again, it interpolates the guitar part from "Life-Sized," which is to me the emotional centre of Visiting the Well. "Everything I See" is about forward trajectory. It's also where the album title comes from, in the lyrics. It's about that self-integration: the sad part of my life and my past is coming with me, but not defining me anymore.

Absent Sounds: When you sit down to write a song, is it more natural for you to do so when you're struggling with something and have to deliberately decide to write a sweet and soft song? Or is it harder to switch?

Clarke Sonderman: It's never that deliberate for me. I always get annoyed when I hear other artists say this, but it kind of just happens sometimes. It's something more innate. I wouldn't say it comes when there's something bothering me. It's more that it comes when something is nagging at me. That could be as simple as my notes app and voice notes being cluttered with one lyric I think is really good that I haven't found a home for yet, or one chord I can't figure out where to go from on the guitar. It's more a resolution of something that keeps coming into my head. At this point in my life, anyway. There were points in my life where it was much more immediate and emotionally driven, and now it's about trying to resolve things that keep coming up.

Absent Sounds: Feels like scratching an itch.

Clarke Sonderman: Yeah, exactly. It's like you finally get that one spot in the middle of your back. That's what it feels like for me at this point.

Absent Sounds: I'll take us to track number nine, "The Wind."

Clarke Sonderman: For sure. The titular wind. To me the song is about a loss of control. It's not being resigned to life, but being blown through life a little bit, or seeing others blown through your life, in a way where there's only so much you can grasp. That's the core image that was sticking with me. But it's also very literal. I spent my time between New York and Fire Island, and I have neighbours in New York who fight all the time, so I was really relieved to leave the city and go sweep the sand on Fire Island. It's a song of overwhelm, for me. Part of it environmental and circumstantial, and part of it overwhelmed by my own choices. I say at one point "alone in useless bars," which sounds a lot darker than I meant it. It's more just a song of exhaustion. Well, what am I doing that leads to my own exhaustion? I don't need to be in these places. It's an acknowledgement of the way I don't prioritise my own wellbeing.

Absent Sounds: But that passivity too. Like you said, allowing things to happen and pass through your life, but it's hard to know when you should grab hold and switch the dial.

Clarke Sonderman: Totally. You said it better than me. That's exactly what I was going for.

Absent Sounds: I also think it's kind of cool that the same wind can be pushing against you, but if you turn the sail a little bit, it'll push you in the right direction somehow.

Clarke Sonderman: Totally. And sometimes it blows some awesome stuff into your life. I'd love to talk about "Have Had."

Absent Sounds: I would love to.

Clarke Sonderman: It's the only, well, I'll say that as a joke, because I also released a cover of "Diet Pepsi" by Addison Rae, but I like to make people think I wrote it. So I'll say "Have Had" is the only cover I've ever recorded.

Absent Sounds: Addison Rae, you better collect your royalty.

Clarke Sonderman: Exactly. I'm going to start collecting from her. No, I'm kidding. I love her. I would do anything for her. "Have Had" is a cover of a song my husband wrote with another composer for a memorial service for a friend they lost to AIDS in '92, I believe. When I first heard it, while I was familiarising myself with Mark's work, it blew me away. It felt like one of the most perfectly written songs I've ever heard, and the most generous description of grief. The singer is so decentred in the lyrics. It's just about what the person they're missing would have loved. The simplicity of it, just the sky and a nice walk on one evening, nothing grander about the life, really stood out to me. I've been with my husband about five years now, and once I sat with the song longer, I thought about the friend it was written for, Don Ruddy. He was a brilliant artist and designed a lot of the furniture in my apartment. He made these crazy elaborate cement contraptions where he would lay mosaic work into a cement slab and then turn it into a table. I'll send you guys pictures.

Absent Sounds: We'd love that.

Clarke Sonderman: It's beautiful work. Thinking about queer lineages has been a big part of my practice, even if it doesn't necessarily come out in the final result. It's a very important part of how I view this work, at least personally. So it felt beautiful to honour this person I never met. He died before I was born, but he was really important to people who are now really important to me, and I'm immersed in his world, living around his work day in and day out. And if the core theme of the album is recovery from grief and opening yourself up to new love again after losing a partner, then having one of the centrepieces of the album be a song my new partner wrote about a similar theme, and expressed better than I did in my own words, writing toward the same idea, that felt like, I keep using the word self-integration, but it felt like the ultimate integration of different moments in my world and in my work. I just love the song. It's one of those pop songs where, I forget the time signature, but you can feel it and you can sing along, and the timing is really weird. It doesn't flow like a pop song. My husband works mostly in the classical and opera world, so there was something about bringing it out of that and into this sphere. I love that song, and I also want a bunch of other people to do versions of it, so I was like, fine, I'll take one for the team. To me, that's a Caroline Polachek song. She should be doing a version of that.

Absent Sounds: That would be so cool. Caroline, if you're listening.

Clarke Sonderman: Yeah.

Absent Sounds: We're waiting. I'm curious how your husband Mark felt listening to your version of it.

Clarke Sonderman: I don't want to speak for him, but I think it was moving and meaningful for him. Partially because any artist, any writer, never really knows the longevity of the work they put in place. But more than that, that sense of lineage and inheritance. I don't want to speak for them, but I would think a lot of queer people who lived through the AIDS era never really know if younger generations of queer people take seriously what happened. So I feel a bit of a responsibility to honour it without taking it on in a way that reads as if it's mine, because it's not really. But it is the backdrop of my experience and what I come from. For the rest of my life, being gay, it's always going to be in the background a little bit.

Absent Sounds: That reminds me so beautifully of a quote. "None of this is mine, but that means all of this is mine too."

Clarke Sonderman: Exactly. Who said that? I love that.

Absent Sounds: I think it was Marianne. I think that was her name. She wrote an album that I liked. Another Canadian artist. Maybe we'll include this in here too.

Clarke Sonderman: Cool.

Absent Sounds: That brings us to the closer, "Thank You." We are such big lovers of any track that has that word.

Clarke Sonderman: I'm thankful for everything. I'm thankful to the two of you for having me on to do this, and for paying such close and careful attention. This is the most seen I've felt as an artist in a really long time. It really means a lot. I'm thankful for everything, as lazy as that sounds, but it's more deliberate for me. There's a constant recognition that I have the freedom and the privilege and the flexibility to go on tour like this, that anyone will come out to listen to our performance, that I can even afford the rental car to do it. I believe foundationally that humanity is connected on a more network-oriented level. I think we can all feel each other in a way, and part of that is a responsibility to recognise how much better off you have it than a lot of people. That's also a good way of zooming yourself out from your own issues. Pain is subjective and relative, and that doesn't make it less real, but it's less about comparing and saying I still have it good. It's more about saying there's a lot of other suffering out there too, and there's also a lot of other perseverance out there too. So I'm grateful for everything. I'm grateful for this experience. I don't know how to say it without just listing specifics, but it's something I try to hold as a guiding principle: recognising that I have food and shelter and things like that, that a lot of people don't.

Absent Sounds: Daily, honestly. We're thankful for this moment, but on a grander scale, we're thankful for your work and your music, and that you continue to put out things and work through everything.

Clarke Sonderman: It won't be as long. I'm setting aside all of October to start demoing.

Absent Sounds: You can only last two weeks before sending it out to a friend.

Clarke Sonderman: Yeah, exactly. I need to shorten every timeframe. I can't do another one.

Absent Sounds: Just put it on TikTok and ask people for their opinions. That's fast.

Clarke Sonderman: Exactly.

[Station ID recorded by Pleasure Systems]

Clarke Sonderman: Hey, I'm Pleasure Systems and you're listening to CJTM 1280 AM in Toronto. This is Pleasure Systems. You're listening to Absent Sounds.