“I’m not alone”: Eric Clapton on the saddest record he ever made
Rock and roll has always been the genre that was the soundtrack to having a good time. The Big Bang of Chuck Berry and Little Richard had ushered in a new form of rock and roll that kept people dancing for years at a time, and when people like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones took things one step further, it was always about making people smile as they were listening to their tunes. But Eric Clapton was cut from a different cloth, and anyone in his circle always knew how to play the blues.
Clapton was certainly aware of what a great pop tune sounded like, but some of his greatest inspirations were those that took rock and roll and brought it back to the days of Muddy Waters and B.B. King. He was always fascinated by that kind of music, but that means getting to know the shape of his heart as well.
The entire point of the blues was about trying to talk about the damage people had done to their hearts and letting it out through song, and when Clapton first started to play, you could feel all of the pain with every single string he bent. It was definitely soulful, but he had a long way to go to realise the true hurt that was awaiting him. Because after overcoming drug addiction and the loss of friends along the way, like Stevie Ray Vaughan, losing a child is the kind of hurdle no one truly gets over.
After his son Connor died after falling out of a window, Clapton seemed to channel all his grief into his music. Nothing was going to end up bringing his son back, and he had done a fair bit of sinning of his own that made him look questionable in the eyes of some fans, but the minute that he came up with ‘Tears in Heaven’, people related to the man who lost his son rather than the larger-than-life superstar who mayhave said some things they didn’t like.
But that was only the beginning of analysing his grief. There was a lot more to be done unpacking everything, and whereas an album like Journeyman saw Clapton going back to the blues, Pilgrim was where he left nothing to the imagination. He had a lot more to unpack, and if his band was going to work with him, they had to be ready to go to some fairly dark places when playing to serve the lyrics.
“When I first conceived this album, I told anybody who was going to get involved that my goal was to make the saddest record that’s ever been made.”
Eric Clapton
When talking about the album later, Clapton felt that this was the most depressing album that he would ever have to write, saying, “When I first conceived this album, I told anybody who was going to get involved that my goal was to make the saddest record that’s ever been made. A couple of people responded by looking at me like I was insane. When I hear very sad records, I don’t get depressed. I feel an affinity, and I feel relief. The first thing I get is a sense of, ‘I am not alone. Thank God! I’m not alone.’”
And while Clapton doesn’t claim to have the answers on how to move on to something like this, it’s easy to relate to his pain. Not everyone has experienced the loss of a child, but hearing his tender side come out felt like a more vulnerable version of what he had done when he first laid down the acoustic version of ‘Layla’ earlier that decade on his Unplugged performance.
If Clapton knew that he was not going to be able to fully recover from Connor’s death, he knew the best thing to do was to make something that could help the world. Because while his son was not going to come back to him, perhaps he could create the kind of songs that could help someone else out of their own darkness.
