First some background to David Clement’s position in the world of recording artists, which helps to shed some light on the alternating angry, melancholic, and hopeful shades to his music. He released a debut CD called Be More Like Me, which enjoyed a fair amount of recognition. It spurred a second CD entitled Hard Candy, which was to be released by Beauty/Mercury records. In an all-too-familiar tale of conglomeration, Universal bought out Mercury/Polygram and Clement was dropped and his CD release postponed indefinitely. Clement revisited the second CD and re-recorded 12 of the 14 original Hard Candy songs. The result is Your Free Gift.

So you certainly can’t blame the guy for songs like “Noid Noid,” where he moans, “What if it’s true and I was never good enough for you/what if it’s real/the fear, the doubt I feel….”

In “Ahh,” the core of the song centers on one line: “I am lame and out of touch like that stupid song you love so much.” My boyfriend might relate to the second part since he hates my taste in music. And maybe it is just because I do enjoy the occasional ballad, but my instinct says that if David Clement softened his music up just the slightest bit (without losing the passion that so clearly engenders his enormous talent), his voice and lyrics would ring a little truer.

And I am right. In “Ms. Davis,” he loses the (somewhat contrived) Alice Cooper edge and you can hear the purity pouring out of words like “I remember the first time I heard that song…up all night and the next day too…words I waited for the only sound.”

It is precisely that fervor for the music he creates is the thing that makes me appreciate David Clement the most. We as a generation seem to be like sheep sometimes, going through this life to get rich, rarely caring that deeply about something (of course this is a generalization). But it’s the most refreshing thing in the world to actually hear someone’s struggle for meaning found on 12 tracks of a CD.

In “Delusion of Last Call,” (of which I share many on various late evenings in New York City), Clements wails, “I know you’re comfortable and bored/but we can make you such a whore.” And he’s right—the commercial appeal that the mainstream music industry creates will turn him into a whore to the masses. And maybe that’s why getting dropped might have been the best thing for him. As evidenced by Your Free Gift, it incited the most pure of passions…and some great music.