New EP by Speed the Plough features an unlikely collaborator, harpsichordist Anna Clemente

Speed the Plough’s “Songs With Anna” EP is a collaboration with harpsichordist Anna Clemente.

Speed the Plough, the long-lived chamber pop ensemble from Haledon, specializes in a pastoral take on indie-rock that soothes, caresses and calms the soul. Most Jersey bands may descend from the punky Warped Tour or alternative rock’s Lollapalooza, but Speed the Plough’s roots conjure a Renaissance Fair — and never more so than on Songs With Anna, a four-song EP that teams the band’s signature sound with Anna Clemente, a harpsichordist from Italy.

This unlikely partnership began several years ago when John Baumgartner, one of Speed the Plough’s founding members, received a missive from Clemente asking if he was the composer of “A Plan, Revised.” That track had appeared on the compilation Luxury Condos Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon, released by Maxwell’s owner Steve Fallon on his Coyote Records label in 1985.

Baumgartner had indeed written the song. But it actually pre-dated Speed the Plough and was recorded by The Trypes, an offshoot of The Feelies that also included Baumgartner’s then-girlfriend/now-wife Toni Paruta Baumgartner. When The Feelies ended their self-imposed hiatus in 1986, The Trypes morphed into Speed the Plough.

“If you wrote this as a short story, nobody would believe it,” said John Baumgartner. “I get this strange call, out of the blue, from an Italian harpsichord virtuoso asking about a song I had written 40 years ago, released on an obscure indie label.”

Clemente, Baumgartner learned, is an internationally renowned classical recording artist who also teaches harpsichord at a conservatory in Florence. Her late husband, a famous luthier in his own right, discovered “A Plan, Revised” while living in the United States and it was one of the couple’s favorite songs for many years.

Toni and John Baumgartner of Speed the Plough.

“It just goes to show that you never know what is going to resonate with somebody,” Baumgartner said. “It took a little while from that first contact, but eventually we decided it would be fun to collaborate.”

The genesis for adding Clemente’s harpsichord to Speed the Plough’s music came when Baumgartner treated himself to a new electronic keyboard. “I was fooling around with one of my old songs — one of those that wound up on this project, actually — and playing with the harpsichord voicing. I actually filed it away for a couple of months and then I thought, why not reach out to Anna and see if she wanted to do something?”

Like many groups, Speed the Plough made some radical changes during the pandemic, when it was impossible for group members to rehearse or record together. “My philosophy changed and everything we’ve been doing the last three or four years was all long-distance collaborations,” said Baumgartner. “So I sent Anna the bare bones and the chord structure for a song, and her enthusiasm for it blew us away. Eventually, the plan for all four of the songs became to get Anna’s harpsichord interpretations of the songs down and then rebuild song ideas around what she was doing.”

Songs With Anna includes “A Plan, Revised” (listen below) and two songs from STP’s 1995 Marina album, “A Saint, Restored” and “Written Each Day.”

“After we did the first three songs that Anna was familiar with, I said something like, ‘Let’s continue with this collaboration,’ and she was all for it. So I pulled out ‘Poison Dart,’ which is something I had written three or four years ago and had filed away.”

Besides Clemente, the Baumgartners reached out to their extended family of musical collaborators including their son Michael; Marc Francia of the Trypes; and Brenda Sauter, Stan Demeski and Glenn Mercer of the Feelies. Guitarist Richard Barnes and bassist Naomi Smith became involved as well.

Toni Baumgartner’s flute adds lovely filigree to the arrangements, while she and Sauter share vocals. “Brenda was just an obvious choice,” said John Baumgartner. “I was always keen on the combination of Brenda and Toni’s voices, so Brenda was on board from the get-go. Then it was just a matter of pulling other people in to do what they do best — Stan on percussion, Michael on guitar parts, and (Stan’s son) John on drum parts.”

ANNA CLEMENTE

These new versions don’t reinvent Speed the Plough’s sound as much as expand it, with Clemente’s harpsichord lending an almost otherworldly feeling. It gives the phrase “going Medieval” a whole new meaning.

“Anna plays the harpsichord the way it was meant to be played,” Baumgartner said. “In other words, she doesn’t make it sound like a rock harpsichord or a folk harpsichord. She plays in the style of the Baroque and Renaissance masters with all the embellishments and ornaments and with the fingering techniques and bass lines that are characteristic of the instrument.”

Added Toni Baumgartner: “She made everything sound new and fresh. She came up with brilliant ideas and gave us these wonderful kind of building blocks to reconstruct the songs in ways we hadn’t considered before.”

“She has the ability to play these songs much better than I ever could,” said John, who usually plays keyboards in the band. “It was really a kind of revelation to me.”

As for the future, could another collaboration be in the offing? “Toni and I talked and after we did these four songs, we didn’t want to push it and go to the well one time too many, for now,” Baumgartner said. “But I did have a few other ideas. We had a Lebanese singer, Mayssa Jallad, on one of our records, and that was an extremely long-distance collaboration. So maybe something with Mayssa and Anna? That could be the beginning of maybe a little bit of musical international diplomacy.”

Today, Haledon; tomorrow, the world.

“Songs with Anna” is available for purchase at speedtheplough1.bandcamp.com, and streaming on all major platforms.

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