Hot Press meets Jake Clemons

“I’m really looking forward to coming back to Ireland,” enthuses Jake Clemons. “I see it as this really big, magnetic, beautiful island. It’s somewhere that I look forward to visiting. Every time I’ve been there, it’s been brilliant.”

The 33-year-old American musician will be playing a short Irish tour in December. The last time the big-haired nephew of the late great saxophonist Clarence Clemons visited these shores was just this summer, when he joined Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the hugely successful Irish leg of their Wrecking Ball tour. Jake was invited to become a member of the band in 2012, soon after Clarence passed away.
As it happened, Jake was in Ireland visiting Glen Hansard when he first got the news that his beloved uncle was seriously ill. Following his death, he went into a deep period of mourning.
“I needed to process the mourning for myself,” he recalls. “There was a moment just a few weeks after Clarence passed away where I was having a hard time coming out of my bedroom. I got a phone call from Glen Hansard and Eddie Vedder. They asked me to come out to a show they were doing and sit in. That was really kind, and it got me out of my room.
“I walked onstage, played some songs, and really connected with the horn. I hadn’t played my horn since he’d passed away. When I was playing I could feel him again. It felt real, like he was present. And that became a really important part of my healing process.”
Growing up as the son of a Marine Corps band director, Jake attended the Virginia Governor’s School for the Arts to study jazz performance and has since used those skills playing alongside a variety of artists ranging from The Israelites to The Swell Season, The Roots and Vedder. On tour with Springsteen, Jake can be seen playing tenor and baritone saxophone, backing vocals and percussion, but is also skilled at the piano, flute, clarinet, bass, drums, and guitar.
“Yeah, I mean my father made me play the piano before I could play anything else. That gave me a great foundation for percussion, for rhythm, for melody. So going from piano to saxophone, it kind of opened up this entire world for me, musically.”
When he’s not playing with Springsteen, Jake writes music and fronts his own band (his latest single ‘You Must Be Crazy’ is available to hear on jakeclemons.com). If you take the mysterious, rugged side of Johnny Cash and mix it with the soulful down to earth love child of Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons – shaken not stirred of course – you end up with the unique and talented Jake. He plays the guitar, sax, piano, and drums; he writes music, he sings, he loves rock ‘n’ roll!
How will it feel playing smaller venues, when he’s just done all those really massive stadium shows with Bruce?
“It’s a fun thing to experience both worlds. It’s kind of like you’re diving into the hot tub and then diving into the ocean, you know? They’re both really great in their own ways. But it’s always special in Ireland. I mean, when that film came out, Once, that was the first time I’d ever seen Grafton Street. And everyone expressed themselves so honestly and so clearly, it really moved me a lot, and it kind of compelled me to express myself, in a kind of odd way. So being there with people who understand that, who have a culture of music that’s as rich as it is in Ireland… you don’t want to come home, you know? It’s just a place I really enjoy. Some of my most fond memories are sitting in the pub until 8 o’clock in the morning, singing songs.”
Alongside Eddie Vedder and Joe Henry, Jake has also played on Glen Hansard’s latest recording – a cover of The Boss’s ‘Drive All Night’, which will be released on December 3 on Anti-Records. The four song EP includes the cover, along with three original tracks.
All profits from the digital single sales of ‘Drive All Night’ will be donated to Little Kids Rock, the non-profit charity Clarence Clemons supported. Little Kids Rock provides music education classes to K-12 students in public schools that have been stripped of their music programmes.
“It’s a really brilliant song,” he states. “Glen and Eddie were monsters to play with. I mean, they’re amazing, they’re massively talented. And Joe Henry as well, it was just an incredible experience to create music with them. But beyond that, it’s a beautiful song itself. That was always one of Clarence’s favourite songs to play. It kind of lingers, that song.”

Jake Clemons plays Whelan’s, Dublin on December 3