On his latest LP, The Hours: Night, musical polyglot Cautious Clay (born Joshua Karpeh) takes us on an hour-by-hour journey through a wistful, introspective evening. A direct follow-up to his The Hours: Morning (a percussive, sunny precursor to Karpeh’s Night), the Philly-based artist’s latest works distill the moodiness and grit of a too-long night bleeding into the amber hours of the morning.
The second installment in his The Hours trilogy, Night turns the forward momentum of Morning inward, featuring moodier, more contemplative lyrics set against heavier, more ambient beats. The Hours comes two years after Cautious Clay released KARPEH, an experimental, jazz-influenced look at his roots that marked a departure from his more R&B-centered prior musical output.
Interestingly, Karpeh is credited under both his stage and birth names on his 2023 album (aptly titled KARPEH). Of the decision to produce musically as both Joshua Karpeh and Cautious Clay, the Cleveland-born singer tells us, “It was an opportunity to expand my creative process without necessarily completely abandoning the sound I wanted to go for with Cautious Clay. It just felt like an opportunity for me to experiment as a producer with Joshua Karpeh and Cautious Clay.”
Karpeh went on to explain that when making music as himself (Karpeh), he feels a greater sense of creative freedom than when he’s making music as Cautious Clay; a more fastidious, meticulous artist than Karpeh himself is naturally. Karpeh likens the Cautious Clay persona to a balustrade that provides him with discipline and structure, while creating music under his own name feels more organic and uninhibited. Karpeh explains, “I feel like Joshua Karpeh is like zero restrictions and Cautious Clay is like there are some guardrails.”
Of his evolving approach to creating music, Karpeh told us, “As time has gone on, I’ve been able to have a lot more experience and grow creatively. The limitations of my own creative process are my own being. I think of the creative process pretty freely and openly.”
While Karpeh’s 2023 album sought to untangle the roots and intricacies of his own familial relationships, The Hours is a much more thematically ubiquitous project. Of the choice to create a more topically broad album, Karpeh said, “I wanted to create a thematic album that was maybe not as personal to my actual life.. Not that The Hours isn’t personal, but it’s more of a universal thing. To spend our hours of the day in such a way that it feels like. ‘OK, you know, maybe we’re wasting time on purpose or trying to be more productive, or maybe we’re trying to have hobbies that inform our work.’ The Hours was sort of a way to address some of those universal feelings.”
Karpeh also used the LP as a way to take a sort of creative stock, telling us, “The Hours was an opportunity to really consider how I spend my time and what I’m really trying to focus on.”
In an interview discussing Morning with Flood Magazine, Karpeh said the track “Promises (9 AM)” was particularly difficult to nail down, taking on nearly 60 iterations across almost a decade before it arrived at the version we get on the LP. While Karpeh said “5th Floor (10 PM)” (the second track on Night featuring A Tribe Called Quest founding member and ex-boyfriend of Nicole Kidman [yes, really!] Q-Tip) presented some technical challenges, Night came with a welcome creative ease.
“This album was actually much easier to make for whatever reason. I don’t know, I’m more of a night person. I think that the ease with which I created this. There was a lot less fiddling with the sounds. Everything was always just kind of there.” Karpeh said. “I didn’t really have to tinker too much with this album, which I feel happy about.”
Alongside his work as Cautious Clay, Karpeh has had an accomplished career as a producer and songwriter, with credits on tracks featuring artists such as Melanie Martinez, Billie Eilish, and John Mayer. The Ohio native even dipped into the Taylor Swift Industrial Complex when he was credited as a co-writer on the song “London Boy” from her 2019 album Lover.
When we asked Karpeh about his approach to creating as a collaborator versus as a solo artist, he told us, “At the end of the day, it’s really just about making sure everyone in the room is comfortable. That’s it. You can be as talented as you want to be, but at the end of the day, people gotta feel comfortable. So the best people aren’t always the most talented. It’s the people who know how to make everybody comfortable being themselves because you get the best results.
“I’ve only been in this scene eight years, but I know a lot of the number one guys,” he continues. “It’s just kind of like they’re all obviously a certain level of talented, but it’s not like there’s anything differentiated between them and anybody else. They know how to make people feel comfortable. That’s really the only secret sauce.”
The “oldest” track that made it onto Night is “Fade Blue (11 PM)”, which Karpeh first produced back in 2021. Of the track, which finds its home on his latest LP, Karpeh said, “It was cool to bring that song back and feel like it makes sense with this project that I’m putting out four years later.” When we asked Karpeh if he regularly looked back at old material from his personal archive when approaching a new project, he told us he likes to balance reviving and recrafting old material with new material.
He explains, “I’m constantly making new material, but I’m also kind of revisiting old stuff. So it is a mix because I think that in some cases, you don’t want to ignore some really good ideas that you had before, right? So sometimes I’ll go back into my vaults and I’ll listen to stuff and be like, ‘Oh shit, this is kind of cool,’ you know? The creative process is such a raw and spiritual thing. It’s instinctual and, in my opinion, it’s always worth revisiting. At any given point, something can rear its head, and I don’t really operate in a referential kind of space.”
Throughout our interview, Karpeh emphasized the importance of the dynamics at play in his music and how the interaction between different aspects of his tracks is highly informative to his creative process. Of balancing outside creative influence with his own musical stylings, he said, “I think that you can borrow sounds in that way, but then I also try to create my own unique vocal delivery, my own lyrics. The dynamics that I bring to it I find to be super important, and I think that the best music, albeit referential, is not based on a particular decade.”
Despite the LP’s obvious chronological component, the project operates circularly more than linearly. With each track coinciding with a specific hour, Morning begins with “Tokyo Lift (5 AM)” (an energetic start to the project, paradoxically chronicling the ending of an evening out bleeding into the early morning) and runs through “Smoke Break (12 PM)”, a logical ending to the first part of The Hours trilogy. Instead of moving straight into the afternoon, Karpeh took a step back in time for Night, beginning the LP at “Shoulders (9 PM)” and continuing through hour-by-hour to where Morning begins.
When listened to in order of release instead of chronologically, the LPs mirror each other in a way that highlights their differences and creative symbiosis. Had Karpeh chosen to follow the project’s own temporal logic, the contrast between Morning and Night wouldn’t feel nearly as pronounced, perhaps detracting from the project’s efficacy in capturing the ephemeral feelings contained within both distinct bodies of work. Where Karpeh’s Morning pushes you forward, Night draws you in closer.
