The guitar in Reflections After Jane does less playing than bouncing off a windowpane. A few gentle chords return from the reverb a little later, as though the music itself were unsure whether it is happening now or remembering its own past.
The track originally appeared as a single in 1999, then found its way onto Suburban Light, a collection of The Clientele’s early recordings. The band then consisted of Alasdair MacLean (vocals, guitar), James Hornsey (bass) and Mark Keen (drums). They recorded simply, using modest equipment, without a production team designing their sound for them.
Imperfection became their most important instrument.
Music from behind the windowpane
In Reflections After Jane the drums do not lead the song towards a destination. They walk alongside it instead, cautiously marking each successive step. The bass moves softly beneath the surface, while MacLean’s guitar dissolves into reverb that takes the clear outlines away from the notes.
Years later, MacLean himself admitted that his early use of reverb arose partly from uncertainty about his own voice. Yet an effect meant to hide something created The Clientele’s entire aesthetic. The vocal was not hidden. It was moved deeper into the recording, to a place where a voice begins to resemble a memory.
You can hear Galaxie 500 here, the delicacy of Felt and sixties psychedelia, but without a collector showing off their records. The Clientele do not reconstruct the past. They use its colours to describe a moment that begins disappearing while it is still happening.
The melody unfolds without pressure. There is no grand chorus, no sudden increase in volume, no moment designed to stop the listener immediately. Instead, there is rain, morning light, people crossing a bridge and Jane, existing more as a trace than as a protagonist.
This song does not describe loneliness. It leaves an empty place for it.
Light in the shop window
Eight years later, The Clientele recorded the album God Save the Clientele in Nashville with Mark Nevers, a producer associated with Lambchop. The sound became cleaner, more spacious and less dependent on the fog of reverb. Mel Draisey joined the band, playing violin and keyboards.
In Bookshop Casanova the guitar no longer retreats from the listener. It repeats a short, decisive motif while the drums build a rhythm that really wants to set the body moving. Draisey’s strings are not there to add gravitas. They arrive lightly and springily, accentuating the flirtation within the melody.
It is still The Clientele, only the reverb has stopped serving as a curtain.
Rather than the melancholy of Galaxie 500, this is closer to the less obvious corners of records by Love and The Zombies, where elegance never ruled out psychedelic unease. The song has an almost danceable pulse, yet beneath its brightness remains the band’s characteristic sense that the night is about to end.
So the Casanova of the title does not conquer the city. He merely tries, for three minutes and a few dozen seconds, to believe in his own charm. A bookshop is a fitting place for a seducer like that. Even his confidence looks as though he read about it beforehand.
Two strategies for loneliness
Reflections After Jane and Bookshop Casanova are separated by eight years, a different studio and an entirely different arrangement of the instruments. The first track shuts a person inside a soft acoustic fog. The second leads them out onto a brightly lit street and offers a rhythm to which they can at least pretend that everything is simpler.
These are not, however, opposing faces of the band.
The same emotion is at work in both songs: a desire for contact coupled with the suspicion that any closeness may prove temporary. In the first, a person shelters from this in a memory. In the second, they try to dance before the light goes out.
That is precisely the most beautiful thing about The Clientele: a change of arrangement does not remove the melancholy. It can only light it differently.
Reflections After Jane is a windowpane covered in rain. Bookshop Casanova is a shop window in which, for a moment, we see our own reflection between books, streetlights and the face of someone we would like to approach.
First the fog lets us hide. Later it learns to dance.
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