Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will celebrate the 20th anniversary of their landmark self-titled debut album with an epic world tour and exclusive new reissue.
The 20th anniversary of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will further be commemorated with a special new reissue, arriving on limited-edition vinyl LP early next year on the band’s own label via Secretly Distribution, the defiantly independent home of Alec Ounsworth’s music for over two decades. The celebration officially gets underway with today’s premiere of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s original 2004 version of the fan favourite, “Heavy Metal,” available everywhere now. Recorded live at Pawtucket, RI’s Machines with Magnets Studios, the newly remixed and mastered track was recently discovered among the original project files and captures what Clap Your Hands Say Yeah founder and frontman Alec Ounsworth calls “a special moment in time – a young group of guys all piling into one hotel room to wake up and go to a real studio (!) to try to come up with something special just for the fun of it.”
“At the time, “Heavy Metal” was meant to appear alongside a small collection of songs to be used for an EP to be shopped around to labels,” Ounsworth says. “We never thought that an album was possible at the time. Later, during the mixing of the EP, a decision was made to add other songs. This final collection of songs went on to be the first album.
“I guess I didn't think this original version of ‘Heavy Metal’ sat very well on the album once we started recording some of the later songs (‘The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth,’ ‘Is This Love?,’ etc.) so I decided the song should be changed even though the original (as a standalone single) had always worked. Now that I listen to the original ‘Heavy Metal’ remixed and mastered, I realize it very well could (should?) have been on the album itself.
“I really like both versions of ‘Heavy Metal’ but 20 years later I think I’ve come to appreciate this one a little more. The rest of the album has this excitement too of course but the earliest songs speak even more to a certain innocence around that time which I try hard not to forget.”