The Charlatan’s Brett Shuck had the chance to chat with Ryan McLennan, Carleton alumnus and vocalist of Toronto rockers Clothes Make the Man.

The Charlatan (TC): Where did the band originate?

Ryan McLennan (RM): Well, I went to Carleton, three of us are from Ottawa and our drummer is from Windsor.

TC: What was your time at Carleton like?

RM: It kind of defined me actually, afterward. When I was in high school, I didn’t have the mental capacity to see myself as part of one person on a larger planet Earth, and when I went to Carleton, everything changed for me.
That’s when I finally started to look at the world as this functioning organism, I suppose. It’s where I became an adult, I think, for real.

TC: How’d you get together as a band?

RM: We all went to high school together, and Phil [Wilson] is actually our second drummer.We were originally all from Ottawa and then our first drummer left, and then we needed to find a drummer, so we found a drummer on Craigslist.

TC: When was the first time you realized, “Hey, I can see myself doing this for my whole life?”

RM: Hearing ourselves on the radio was cool. I mean, we played Edge Fest here in Toronto in 2009, and that was cool because it was a huge festival crowd, and that was certainly a moment where I thought, “You know, if we could just play a crowd like this all the time, I’d be happy.” So yeah, probably those two things.

TC: Where did the name of your band come from?

RM: It’s a Mark Twain quote. “Clothes make the man: naked people have little influence on society,” or something like that. Course it’s the slogan at Winner’s.

TC: How hard was it to break into the Toronto music scene?

RM: We got kind of lucky. I remember we went to the Horseshoe Tavern, which is probably my favourite club, to see a band. We brought a horrible demo back in 2003 and said we would like to play here.


It’s notoriously difficult to get a show there, but for some reason, I think he could just tell we were naive little punks, and then at first we were sort of embraced as a new sort of band, but that was a long time ago.

TC: How do you write your songs?

RM: If I play enough, a song will sort of happen. I kind of get lucky. The trick for me is to just play all the time . . . If it’s something that sounds like it could be a song, I try to write some words, and I’ll just write a million words, and hopefully I’ll get a three minute song out of it.


Then I’ll bring it to the band, and if it is halfway decent, they’ll tell me, “Let’s work with that,” and we’ll go from there, and everyone will add their sort of two cents. . . . I learned long ago to just not worry about it if it’s just not working. Just let it go because there will be more ideas.

TC: For people trying to get into the music business, what do you suggest?

RM: Do it because you love music. The only reason to get into the music business is for a love of music, because at the end of the day, there isn’t that much business that goes on.
If you like to make money, have two jobs . . . Because it can be really hard to be able to afford to buy a new pair of pants and still be in a band. It’s just sort of the time we live in, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Just have two jobs at once.