Tim the Mute - Welcome to the Sad Cafe
Tim Clapp is a very busy man.
“I’m basically always working,” he says, seated outside the Starbucks on Main and 14th Avenue, only a few blocks down from the Neptoon Records, where he works one of his several jobs. “Luckily I’m able to access my phone a lot, so I’m always answering questions. If I had to turn my phone off at night and work 9 to 5 it’d be too much stuff for me to do in a day.”
Aside from working at Neptoon Records, Tim manages a bookstore, Reasons to Live, and he writes and records a new album for his band Tim the Mute every year. He organizes an annual Christmas Benefit Concert in Vancouver. And he tours with his band. Yet still, on top of all of that, he also stays busy releasing other people’s music through his label Kingfisher Bluez. For the past decade, his label has put out records by the likes of Skye Wallace, Peach Pit, Apollo Ghosts, and many more. There have been over 150 releases since the first Kingfisher Bluez vinyl short-run. The most recent record from his label is his own, Welcome to the Sad Cafe.
This latest Tim the Mute effort is the second in a trilogy of loose-concept albums inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s a relatable and sweetly melancholic collection of songs about depression, anxiety, the end of a relationship, and moving on. The songs are so honest and human that it’d be nearly impossible not to connect with them.
When asked about his creative process, Tim has this to say: “I usually come up with the idea for an album all at once. The first thing I think of is the concept for it, the album title, the cover. Then I write songs that will fit into that idea.”
Currently, Tim is in the middle of a larger idea, spanning three albums. The previous release, Do In Yourself, which was released in July 2018, was meant to be inspired by Dante’s Inferno. “It was about coming out of a long term relationship, so the different gates of hell are like coming out of a really bad breakup.”
The end of the album feels very cathartic, so it makes sense that the next album, Welcome to the Sad Cafe, would be a bit more like Dante’s Purgatory. “I had this idea of a sort of inter-dimensional all-night diner,” Tim says, “inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.”
The songs for Welcome to the Sad Cafe were also inspired by a book Tim was reading at the time, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which describes the Tibetian World of the Dead.
Following suit, the next album will be inspired by Dante’s Paradiso. Recording will start at the beginning of 2020. Tim plans on having it released by summertime.
Until then you can pick up a copy of Welcome to the Sad Cafe on Vinyl at Neptoon Records or through the Kingfisher Blues Bandcamp page, which features some very interesting and unique merchandise for the release, including Sad Cafe mugs, “El Salvador” Sad Cafe Coffee Beans, Sad Cafe Tea Towels, and of course Sad Cafe Pickles that are labelled like the jar on the album cover. These merch items really give you an idea of how much thought Tim puts into his album concepts. The album cover itself has an interesting story behind it too:
“The cover of my record is a ripoff of this record by a Newfoundland folk singer called Chris Hennessey. The record is called Ballad of the Sad Cafe. But on the cover he’s sitting there and he’s holding a pint of beer and then he’s got an ashtray in front of him and a captain’s hat, and I just thought it was the saddest picture. And it’s funny because it said Sad Cafe on there too. So I ripped off the cover for my record cover. But I don’t really drink beer so I thought I’d put a jar of pickles there.”
Even the design of the pickle jar label has a story behind it. “There’s a scene in that book Lincoln in the Bardo where a guy says, ‘If you ever ate a pickle in the Pacific Northwest in the early half of the century and it had a mustard and red label with a wolverine in a waistcoat that was probably one of my Decroix Ferocious pickles.’ And I thought that was so specific and funny. I just thought I’m gonna make that a real thing. It’s such a great image. It’s a shame it doesn’t exist. So I had those pickles designed and you know, you make one thing of pickles you might as well make a few dozen. They’ve got a minimum order for the labels. So I made 24 jars of pickles. I only have two left, so they went pretty well.”
The world of the Sad Cafe that Tim has created is a fascinating and detailed aggregate of emotions and artistic influences. It’s a wonderful place to visit, check it out below.