NEW ALBUM OUT NOW
On Borrowed Time is Carl Cleves’ 7th solo album, written over two years of health challenges that saw him seesaw between hospitals and recuperations. As with previous work, this acoustic collection comes in an Idiosyncratic range of styles and subject matter. Folk, blues, jazz and latin feels.
There are survival songs, romantic love declarations, the challenge of aging, the facing of mortality and the passion for living, the pleas of refugees and the rage at the state of our world. Twelve new compositions in a stream of poetry, wit, emotion and humor, accompanied by a stellar selection of friends and long-time collaborators. On Borrowed Time resonates with depth and authenticity.
Media photos
About Carl
Carl Cleves, troubadour, author and musicologist was born in Mechelen, a traditional Flemish town in Belgium. After graduating with a Law degree he was offered a scholarship to study traditional African music with ethnomusicologist John Blacking in South Africa. This started off many years of travel throughout Africa, the Middle East, the Orient, the Pacific Region and South America, guitar in hand, acquiring musical skills and an endless supply of stories and songs. His adventurous life has included stints as an antelope trapper in Uganda, relief worker in cyclone struck India, foreign correspondent and ethnomusicologist in Africa and night club crooner in the South Pacific. While living in Brazil he became a popular recording star and bandleader. He lives with his wife on the east coast of Australia.
He is the author of the trilogy Tarab: Travels with My Guitar, Dancing with the Bones and Soundtracks of my Life, an epic memoir of high adventure and the search for musical ecstasy.
His seven solo albums and six with The Hottentots, co-founded with his wife, singer-songwriter Parissa Bouas, have won international praise and numerous awards, including Music OZ, NCEIA and Australian Songwriters Association Award for Best Australian lyricist. ‘Songs both intimate and powerful’; ‘a vision whimsical and wise’; a guitar style ‘utterly captivating, pregnant with unexpected nuance’. He has toured internationally, records for the German Stockfish label and has appeared at all major Australian Folk festivals.
About The Songs
Like a Bird and Living on Borrowed Time are survival songs, ‘crawling through the eye of a needle’. Troubadour songs on opiods.
Walk with me Brother ‘was written after my wife Parissa and I arrived in Paris, only weeks before the covid epidemic struck us all. We took a taxi from Orly airport into town and, stopping at the traffic lights, cars were instantly surrounded by refugees, holding bits of paper and calling out for help. It happened over and over again. No one opened the window. Taxi drivers were used to it. Perhaps a sense of helplessness. A nuisance to be ignored. It left a deep imprint that birthed this song.’
I Abandon my Habits deals with the woes of old age, especially for those of us facing the trial on their own, which can be a tough call. =
Greed roars with the fury and indignation against the inaction of our leaders in the climate crisis of floods, fires and mass extinctions. Dan Brown on keys, Kamal Engels on bass, Elliott Orr on calabash, Parissa Bouas and Rochelle Bowles on vocals.
King of the Castle is jazz-blues featuring Paul Chenard on soprano sax and Dan Brown on keys.
The Ace of all my Cards is a tongue-in-cheek lambada dance tune. With Stuart Eadie on drums, Rodney Coe on double bass, Dan Brown on keys and Parissa Bouas on shaker.
The world belongs to the young. I live in the tourist town of Byron Bay where the beaches are carpeted with healthy young models in their teens and twenties. Older women complain about being invisible. But soon older men too join the invisible club. Agism is alive in our modern world. A protest song for seniors.
Going Home, the second song about the tragic fate of refugees, narrates the story of Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned, together with his mother and brother, off the coast of Turkey in the family’s flight to freedom from the civil war. The photo of the dead infant went viral in the international media. The song reimagines the reassuring words of his father the night before the fateful journey in an inflatable dinghy.
Para Sonhar (To dream) is a Brazilian lullaby written for Clarinha and Albertinho, two young children of Carl’s friends in Brazil, a country where he resided for seven years and enjoyed a successful solo career, recording his first two albums. Sung with Parissa Bouas.
Mother and Daughter portrays the grievous issue of dealing with a parent suffering from dementia. The string arrangement was crafted by Kamal Engels
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Kamal Engels at Art of Audio, Mullumbimby, Australia.
SONG LYRICS & album notes below