Blame (in part) the PNW for Stomp-Clap-Hey
No Blind Pilot erasure here in this house
If you distill down this chart from Max Read, I think you could say it makes an argument that Stomp-Clap-Hey is a global genre that pulls out elements of regional vibes and regional music across the following areas:
Brooklyn
Los Angeles
Canada
England
Utah and other Mormon enclaves
and/or could be described as what happens if you take the harder-edged and somewhat weirder vibes you would get from just a combo of Brooklyn (twee folk) + Los Angeles (druggy folk) + Canada (weird chamber pop folk) and sanding it down with Mormonism and Britishness1.
I would argue that there’s one key piece missing, and one area that really was the place where proto-Stomp-Clap-Hey found its most coherent form before obviously getting crystallized via Mumford & Sons/The Lumineers et al: the Pacific Northwest.
I, as a music fan who went to middle and high school in Seattle in the critical years of 2006-2012, am well positioned to argue this, not least because I literally played in multiple folk bands at the time!!!!2
While grunge is obviously the first thing that comes to mind if you think Seattle music, in that mid-to-late-2000s period the two predominant local genres (imo) were independent backpack rap3 and indie folk. A lot of the folk would be either solo musicians with guitar or, occasionally, harp4, or groups that had a little bit more of a chamber pop influence.
In the first half of the 2000s in the Northwest you have your squarely indie rock artists like Death Cab For Cutie/The Postal Service, The Shins, Band Of Horses, and Modest Mouse. That starts to shift with groups like The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Blind Pilot, and Hey Marseilles taking a more folk-influenced direction. Fleet Foxes are really the huge one, the key standard-bearer of the Northwest indie folk scene and the sort of west coast counterpoint to Bon Iver’s midwest misery. But listen to Hey Marseilles and Blind Pilot, and you start to hear a lot of the elements that will crystallize into the Stomp-Clap-Hey in a few short years (particularly some of the sea-shanty vibe that Hey Marseilles plays with.) There’s also a strain of more straightforward singer-songwriter music, typified imo by Brandi Carlile and other solo artists like Carly Calbero, noted for being the single nicest person my eh-just-okay high school band ever opened for! And gnarlier, more folk-punk adjacent stuff like The Duchess & The Duke5. A lot of these artists end up on labels like Sub Pop or Barsuk, the predominant indie labels of the region.
I think a lot of Read’s chart is basically right, in that again if you mix Brooklyn twee with Canadian chamber pop with Los Angeles druggy folk you don’t get Stomp-Clap-Hey but you get something that can become it if Mormonized and British-ized. But I just think that the first glimpse of it happened in the Northwest.
And this combo is really really typified by: fellow Sub Pop band The Head & The Heart. Listen to this, a song contemporaneous with Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers and Of Monsters & Men, and it’s basically exactly Stomp-Clap-Hey to a tee.
You don’t quite get exactly Stomp-Clap-Hey from Fleet Foxes, Blind Pilot, or Hey Marseilles, all of which are a either bit more chamber-pop-y or mellow or esoteric, nor from this era of Brandi Carlile (she does it a little bit more on later albums.) But The Head And The Heart? Stomp and clap away!
It’s unclear to me exactly why this style would arrive in parallel in the Northwest as it would in Jersey (The Lumineers) and England (Mumford & Sons) and Iceland, apparently (Of Monsters & Men) but maybe this is just what happens in a globalizing music world. The Northwest does also, for all its coastal liberalism, have a very back-to-the-land conservative streak (evidenced by all the cult compounds we have!!) and Mormons are allegedly 2nd to Catholics in terms of largest religious denominations in Washington State, so maybe that makes it the perfect powder keg for taking indie folk (itself a byproduct of the aforementioned Brooklyn + Canada + Los Angeles mix, plus a long local tradition of mountain/coastal folk) and sprinkling some light reactionary touches on it. It’s also, like Brooklyn, both 1) rich and 2) fiercely covetous of its (partly true, partly imagined) hardscrabble past. Who knows! Someone write a PhD thesis on this!
But I just want to make it clear: the PNW absolutely deserves credit (and blame) for its little part of Stomp-Clap-Hey67.
Britishness is usually used derisively, in the Mumford & Sons context, as in “posh lads pretending to be dust bowl.” And while true, I do think there is also some element of the British mining-labo(u)r-adjacent, Billy-Bragg-esque folk movement that forms part of the lineage that leads to Mumford & Sons specifically. Bastardized, to some degree (on the first album more in that it’s over-intellectualized I think, on the later ones is where it really grinds down any of the edge) but I do think in Stomp-Clap-Hey you have both British (pejorative) and British (complimentary.)
Mandolin in a true bluegrass trio, guitar and harmonies in a 2-person singer/songwriter duo, and drums/occasional bass in a rock band first and foremost, but we did do a handful of acoustic shows as well as annual busking stints at Folklife.
Hilariously, typified at least in the outside-of-Seattle popular imagination by Macklemore. Though to his credit, he was a beloved heavy hitter of the local scene for years before the Thrift Shop blowup, to the point where freshman year of college when I heard people in the dorm playing it I thought to myself “Why the fuck are they playing Macklemore, the guy who played at my high school and headlines Bumbershoot, this is California?” Alas, he bears the curse of the successful, double so for being successful as an earnest white guy in a black genre, but I guess that’s what the money’s for. Also, he’s a nice guy, the brief times I’ve met him!
I was literally going to be a mandolin accompaniment for a solo harpist in the big Seattle under-21 battle of the bands one year, but had to drop out because we had a family vacation the day of the show 😔
Both Calbero and Duchess & The Duke take a lot of the busker lineage of 20th century folk activists like Jim Page and the aforementioned Folklife Festival
To be clear, I love love love Fleet Foxes, Hey Marseilles, and Blind Pilot. Hey Marseilles I’ve probably seen like 3 or 4 times! And even Mumford & Sons I really loved their first album in high school, and I would argue they don’t become full Stomp-Clap-Hey parodies until their second album. The first is a little darker edged and a little more literary in a way that I really enjoyed at the time and still have a soft spot for (it literally has songs in minor keys, lol, which is somewhat antithetical to true Stomp-Clap-Hey.) The Lumineers and Head and the Heart I did really love, because I as a Seattle mandolin and guitar player who busked at Folklife 3/4 of my years of high school was of course going to get caught up in the Stomp-Clap-Hey mode. For instance, on arriving in my freshman dorm as part of my attempt to get to the free shipping threshold on Amazon I bought both the second Mumford & Sons album and the first Of Monsters & Men one. But those I now disclaim.
I keep accidentally writing it “Stomp-Clamp-Hey”, which is presumably a quite different vibe.