About This Item
Nobody Lives Here Anymore. The shopping malls have closed down, the dressing rooms are filled with ghosts, and the carousel is covered in cobwebs. Nobody Lives Here Anymore, the latest and greatest from Max Clarke as Cut Worms, is the haunted reverie of an American landscape in-and-out of Clarke's mind. Recorded between May and November 2019 in Memphis, Tennessee, the album is a snow globe of the mid-twentieth-century's popular music filled with chiming guitars, honkey tonk pianos, and Telstar organs. A constant creator - be it his Cut Worms alter-ego or his day-job illustration work (designing brand logos and beer labels with madhouse technicolor pictures) - writing and making records has always been Max's driving force. So after an extensive eighteen-months of touring in support of 2017's Alien Sunset and 2018's Hollow Ground, he set about sifting through the fragment pieces and sketches of tunes he'd accumulated, along with a jet-stream of new compositions, mining his life-long devotion to the lost American songbook for inspiration. By the time he flew to Memphis to work with producer Matt Ross-Spang at Sam Phillips Studio, he'd stockpiled more than thirty new songs. Unlike earlier works that were meticulously demoed, Clarke opted for rough drafts as he would with one of his drawings, seeking to capture something more immediate and honest. Most of the initial takes were tracked live with Noah Bond on drums, while Max sang and played rhythm guitar. He then built rich arrangements around these intimate performances. Max's longtime partner Caroline (Gohlke) contributed backing vocals (she also shot the cover photo), and a skeleton crew of friends and Memphis all-stars were called in to lay down pedal steel, sax, and strings. When all was said and done, they had recorded seventeen songs. With an overstuffed bag brimming with certifiable cosmic Americana gems and no sho
