“I had an inheritance from my father. It was the moon and the sun. And though I roam all over
the world, the spending of it’s never done.”

—Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Emilie Clepper is a unique artist in the Americana genre given that she split her formative years between Quebec and Texas. Her latest album, The Family Album—Featuring Russell Clepper, pays homage to the prodigious songwriting of her father. It’s a gorgeous testament to her family’s commitment to the art of song. Emilie Clepper’s voice is clear and deep, putting one in mind of Lucinda Williams or Lily Hiatt, but it’s also a voice that picks up inflections from all over North America, from French Canada to the oilfields of Texas. Guitarist and producer Joe Grass’ measured and rhythmic acoustic guitar strums allow the poignant vocal phrasings to float above the music. It’s the perfect delivery for Russell Clepper’s descriptive narrative songs.

Russell Clepper is an underrated songwriter. I first came across him at the storied Tipperary Pub in West Detroit when Leo Papa brought him to town to play a string of gigs with his band Clepper, Pair, George. Russell’s stories and ballads evoke the places in Texas he has lived but also serve as elegies for friends and musical colleagues who have gone on. When Emilie sings “Pablo’s Mandolin,” a tribute to the late Terlingua, TX musician Pablo Menudo, we trust that Texas music lives in her blood and bones and that her father serenaded her to sleep with his songs when she was a child. It’s not hard to imagine how music would be so soothing to a young girl who split her time between such geographically remote and culturally disparate places. While one can’t always be with family members, Emilie Clepper proves that we can carry family members with us when we memorize their songs and stories. 

Emulating her musical father, Emilie Clepper learned to play guitar at 11, and there’s a profundity to a music when it’s internalized and learned before its scope and meaning are understood in any cerebral way. Listening to Emilie Clepper’s delivery, one gets the sense that these songs are learned twice; the knowledge in the playing and voicing has a Blakean range, from innocence to experience and back. Which is to say there is an ethereal, inherited wisdom here, but also an experiential wisdom that comes from serious artistry, from living out and in the songs, from repeating chords and melody lines until the singer and the airs meld into each other. 

Emilie Clepper also brings a bilingual wisdom drawn from French Canada to this record. “La Valse à Gaétan,” for instance, is a haunting duet the Cleppers sing exclusively in French. The acoustic guitar and violin arrangement on this one are executed with incredible patience and tempo, and there’s something ineffable about Grammy-winner Joel Savoy’s attack on the instrument. The mystery of the waltz to Gaétan, the beauty of hearing the romance language sung, the mutual love and respect carried in the voicings and the voices—it’s enough to make this listener shed a tear or two while thinking of his own father, a man who studied French literature, loved the troubadour tradition, and would’ve been able to help our writer translate the denotative meaning of the words. This is, of course, what great music does—it eludes our understanding in order to be felt.  

“Streets of Quebec” is one of the album’s standouts, and though it is mostly written in English, the last half-verse is a reprise of the English translated into French. On the surface, the tune is a Quebec City drinking song about a group of revelers picking guitars and quaffing beer in bars and wandering out into the streets beneath the eerie effects of the northern lights, but it’s so imagistically-drawn that we feel like participants in the scene and wish we really were; this is one of the many spots where Russell Clepper’s writing shines like those mysterious green apparitions in the sky. To have the ability to draw like that in words, to mythologize the towns along the St. Lawrence Seaway, to know the keys and key changes to unforgettably enact the melody. Russell Clepper’s craft as a songsmith really is unparalleled, and we’re all fortunate that Emilie has paid him this tribute. 

It’s all captured brilliantly by producer Joe Grass, who also plays lead and rhythm guitar on the record. Grass is a flexible guitarist; on tracks like “Streets of Quebec” and “Steal My Car,” Grass’ guitar reminds us of Luther Perkins with those honky-tonk walks along the bass strings, yet on the slower ballads, Grass picks up acoustic guitar and drifts into the background with tasteful textural playing. The way Grass utilizes the strengths of the musicians on the session—Liam O’Neill (drums), Morgan Moore (bass), John Sadowy (piano), Pete Weiss (accordion)—shows a deep appreciation for what the songs are about. We never lose the sense of narrative or lyrics in the music; the sonic scape is built in service of Emilie Clepper’s plangent and soulful voice, and in these arrangements Russell Clepper’s lyrics flourish.

Emilie Clepper was born in Quebec City. Her mother was French Canadian, her father a Texan who also happened to be a songwriter. All her life, she has been both blessed and tormented by her cultural duality, which has contributed to her artistic expression and output. Thanks to her father and an older brother, she chose music as her preferred art form, and has garnered widespread attention and praise since her days as a busking street urchin, to her present life as a recording artist, single mother and engaged resident of a small riverbank town near Quebec City.

Russell Clepper was born in Lubbock, Texas in 1951, but was raised mostly on the Gulf Coast before returning to Lubbock to attend Texas Tech University. There he met and followed the careers of Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. He began writing songs during that time, but didn’t really begin performing professionally until around 1999 when he moved back to Texas from where he had been living in Quebec. He has lived on Whidbey Island since 2009.