Claybourne Elder gets personal, playful & a little creepy with a package of reimagined standards
In celebration of his debut album 'If The Stars Were Mine,' Claybourne Elder shares his picks for our queer time capsule.
Mark
Claybourne Elder knows a thing or two about timeless classics.
For his debut album, If The Stars Were Mine, the actor, singer & Broadway veteran selected a number of iconic songs he’s adored throughout his lifetime—from Stephen Sondheim to Whitney Houston—then re-arranged & reimagined them with fresh perspective for fans new & old.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about storytelling,” Elder tells Queerty, “how each song connects, what emotional journey it creates and what I wanted to say with each song. Then I worked with my arrangers Rodney Bush and Bryan Perri to create versions of the songs that hopefully make people hear them in new ways.”
For instance, he remembers hearing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” as a young gay man, when he thought he might not ever find—in Whitney’s words—”a love that burns hot enough to last.” In turn, Elder’s version on the album emphasizes the loneliness and longing at the core of it, making the enduring pop hit even more resonant for the queer kid in all of us.
On the flip-side is the My Fair Lady standard “On The Street Where You Live”: “I have always thought [it] was a tiny bit stalker-y,” he jokes, so he & his collaborators went with an arrangement that heightened its creepiness.
As Elder puts it, “I’ve always lived somewhere between a song and a punchline,” so it’s no surprise If The Stars Were Mine is equal parts heart & humor, capturing the true essence of being alive and all of its contradictions.
He brings that same energy to his live show, which is describes as “kind of half-way a stand-up comedy special and half my TED talk”—and, yes, he sings, too! Elder’s been writing the show & performing it across the country for the better part of the past three years, but now he’s bringing it home to NYC in celebration of the album release with a series of live performances at the iconic 54 Below, April 3, 4 & 15.
“I’ve gotten to hide inside some great characters in my career–someone else’s feelings, someone else’s story,” he says in a press statement. “Now I’m taking those words and making them my own.”
And speaking of those great characters, we couldn’t help but bring up his unforgettable turn as John Adams on The Gilded Age, whom the HBO period piece tragically said goodbye to last season. Elder remains in awe of that experience, and shares what’s been the hardest part to say goodbye to:
“What I’ll really miss is how much it felt like a backstage hang disguised as a television set,” he admits. “There are so many theater people in that cast—people I’ve known for years, people I’ve admired forever—that it created this immediate sense of shorthand. You’d be standing in full period costume, waiting to shoot, but it felt like standing in the wings of a theater.”
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But back to the classics: With If The Stars Were Mine available now, we invited Elder to take part in our ongoing Queer Time Capsule project, which asks some of our favorite LGBTQ+ icons to hand select five items from the culture that they feel are worthy of being preserved for the queers of the future
So, head below to find out what 5 timeless pieces of pop culture Claybourne Elder believes will “burn hot enough to last” for generations of gays to come in our Queer Time Capsule:
1. Moonlight
“A seismic shift in queer storytelling—quiet, poetic, and unapologetically specific, it expanded what queer cinema could look and feel like, especially for Black queer narratives.”
2. A Catherine O’Hara highlight reel (especially her work in Schitt’s Creek)
“Moira Rose alone deserves preservation—an unintentional queer icon. But also Home Alone, Beetlejuice, Guffman… She could be your mother or your evil step mother with equal believability.”
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3. Dancer From The Dance by Andrew Holleran
“A snapshot of pre-AIDS gay life that’s intoxicating and haunting. And I would highlight the quote: “Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together'”
4. A Playbill from Oh, Mary!
“Because future generations deserve proof that at some point we collectively decided the best way to process history was to make it extremely gay, slightly unhinged, and very, very funny—and somehow that counted as culture.”
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5. A marriage equality newspaper from the day of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision
“Because it’s a reminder that something that felt impossible for so long finally became official—proof that cultural shifts can suddenly harden into history you can hold in your hands.”
Claybourne Elder’s debut album If The Stars Were Mine is now available. If you’re in the NYC area, don’t miss his show at 54 Below on April 3, 4 & 15—tickets available here—and hot tip: you’ll be able to livestream his show on the 15th no matter where you are (tickets & more info here).
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