Cloudbelly returns with intimate songs and a maximalist sound

Every song has two stories. There’s the narrative inside the song — the tale of a broken heart, or two people falling in love — and then there is the story behind the song, the circumstances that made it. By definition, the two are never quite the same. Usually, the story of true love is more mundane in real life. And even a breakup, its wretched calamity laid bare, becomes more mythic in the telling.

This is a fact that the musician Corey Laitman recently came to accept. On the latest album with their band Cloudbelly, Laitman ruminates on two relationships that ended painfully. Laitman is no stranger to mining their personal life for material — it’s therapeutic — but something about the demise of one particular friendship felt different.

“So many of the songs I've written have been about romantic relationships, and there was something in the breakup of those romantic relationships that I could kind of dramatize,” Laitman said one afternoon, sitting between their two bandmates in the dressing room of the Shea Theater Arts Center in Turners Falls. “But I couldn’t do that with this friendship. It was just pure, unmitigated pain. It was just pain. And that was the first time that was really true for me. It didn't feel like a sad, beautiful story. It just sucked.”

You can hear Laitman struggle to take it all in on a song called “Handfuls.” The chorus starts like this: “And your mind’s made up/ I know, I know, I know” — a statement of affirmation that lands, paradoxically, as an expression of denial. It’s a potent phrase, instantly recognizable to anyone who has professed to know and accept a fact they are not entirely prepared to know or accept. Cloudbelly repurposed the line for the title of the band’s new album, “i know i know i know,” which came out in February.

Laitman writes with rich, evocative imagery. An early mention of falling snow in “Handfuls” reappears in the chorus as a tender metaphor for loss: “Still I’ll be gathering handfuls of you/ Against the cold.” Laitman’s melodies are equally lyrical, yearning and gently euphoric.

These qualities have been constants in Laitman’s songs since the musician’s start, more than a decade ago, in New York’s anti-folk scene. Their early solo albums were lo-fi, intimate and acoustic, an aesthetic that carried through the first Cloudbelly album, “Thou/Them.”

Cloudbelly, originally conceived as a duo at the start of the pandemic, signed with the Northampton label Signature Sounds and began to generate some local buzz as they ramped up to release “Thou/Them” in 2021. Then Laitman’s collaborator left the band. The split, Laitman said, was extremely painful. That, along with what Laitman described as the “gnarly” end to a romantic relationship, prompted some hard self-reflection for the singer. 

“Throughout my life, a lot of relationships have kind of ended in these very clipped ways, with a lot of harshness, and [I’ve been] coming to terms with the fact that, like, who's the common denominator here?” they said, wryly. “It was a real reckoning with my own harmful patterns and the harmful ways that I relate.”

Here’s how Laitman tells the next part of the story: One day, they went to Mill River Music in Northampton, in search of a harmonizer pedal to help them build a more expansive sound. Someone working at the shop suggested they talk to their “pedal guy.” That turned out to be Sam Perry, a guitarist who happened to live on the same block in Turners Falls as Laitman. The next week, they got together to play.

“The musical synergy was pretty much there immediately,” Perry said. But he worried he might not be a good match for Laitman, musically. “I said to Corey, ‘I’m not really a folk person. I’m kind of a weird, experimental indie rock person,’” he said. “And Corey was very much like, ‘No, no. I want it to be weird.’”

The pair began to work up arrangements for Laitman’s songs. While they were preparing for a gig at Arcadia Folk Festival, they decided they needed a drummer. Perry suggested Nate Mondschein, a producer, engineer and drummer from Vermont who works under the moniker Best Mann. After listening to his Bon Iver-esque solo album while driving home from a gig, Laitman decided to bring him on as a producer as well. The trio began work on “i know i know i know” in the fall of 2022.

The results are maximalist in comparison to Cloudbelly’s earlier sound. Layered guitars, stacked vocals and shimmery violins — arranged by frequent collaborator Reed Sutherland — lend Laitman’s writerly songs a pop music sheen. 

“I also, at this time, was doing a lot of work in pop and R&B,” Mondschein said. “So pretty immediately I started sneaking in some vocal samples and stuff like that into the background.” Sutherland’s string parts informed the arrangements for Laitman’s multitudinous backing vocals. “Exploding out the vocals and seeing where we could take those felt kind of essential to the sound we ended up with,” Mondschein said.

Sitting in a row on a couch in the green room, the trio had an easy rapport, teasing and praising each other in the same breath. Mondschein waxed poetic about the multiple meanings in the line “Still I’m gathering handfuls of you against the cold.” “It’s an acknowledgment of the existence of that relationship beyond the relationship,” he told Laitman at one point during this digression. “You’re good at lyrics, is what I’m saying,” he concluded, and laughed.

The comfortable vibe, the sweet remarks: they were reminders of the preciousness of any friendship. Relationships between people can change; that’s the singer-songwriter’s bread and butter. As time passes, the stories you once told yourself — about falling in love, for instance, or about a breakup — begin to shift.

In a song called “Zero G's,” Laitman grapples with the vertiginous effect of their own changing perspective. “Well, here’s the thing,” the song begins. “I have loved being in love/ With a daydream/ My silver-tonsiled, seven-layer smokescreen/ Do you catch my meaning, darling?” And then, a little later: “I have heard the crooked noises/ That a lie makes.”

“That’s kind of referring to the lies I’ve told other people,” Laitman said, “but mostly to the lies that I was telling myself about my own behavior.”

A song looks different with the passage of time. There’s the story you told yourself when you wrote it, and the one you tell yourself now. Maybe it’s impossible to completely reconcile the two. But there’s always the urge to write another song. “I don’t expect forgiveness,” Laitman sings. “I just want a way to name whatever this is.”