Let’s get one thing straight: Cautious Clay is not a morning person. Not even close.
“Most of my work and genuine activities occur … not in the morning, if I can help it,” he laughs, sounding like someone who’s been personally victimized by the concept of sunrise yoga.
And yet, here he is, dropping an album called The Hours: Morning — a record that, on the surface, seems tailor-made for the kind of people who post sunrise selfies and talk about “seizing the day” without a hint of irony.
But if you think this is a record about the joys of waking up early, you’re missing the point. The Hours: Morning is less about the tyranny of the alarm clock and more about the weird, liminal spaces we all inhabit as we move through our days. It’s a concept album for the chronically online, the work-from-home crowd, the people who measure time in coffee refills and existential dread. In other words: it’s for us.
The Concept
When I ask Cautious Clay — real name Joshua Karpeh — why he wanted to make an album about the morning, he’s quick to clarify.
“It’s not just the morning,” he says. “It’s really about the hours in general, and what I prefer to listen to or hear at particular times of day. Each hour has always had a distinct feeling to me.”
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This isn’t some grand, overwrought concept album with a plot you need a flowchart to follow. Instead, Karpeh wanted to challenge himself: Could he make music that captured the vibe of a specific hour? Could he take something as subjective as “how 6 a.m. feels” and make it universal?
“Some of it was based on lyrics, some on the sonic components,” he explains. “You have songs like ‘Traffic’ that just feel like, well, traffic. Or ‘Amber,’ which is the color of the album and kind of fits in the wheelhouse as well.”
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one that feels weirdly radical in an era when every pop star is trying to sell you a cinematic universe.
“It was a fun practice,” Karpeh says. “It felt very much exciting and sort of carefree because there wasn’t this super grandiose concept. It was a pretty simple concept, and it felt refreshing to me, creatively, coming off my last album.”
The Process
Here’s the thing about making an album about time: It takes a lot of it. Over the past year, Karpeh wrote almost 60 songs, whittling them down to the eight that make up The Hours: Morning.
“That was actually the hardest part,” he admits. “Just figuring out where to put my focus because I have so much music that may or may not see the light of day.”
Some of these songs have been with him for years — one track on the album was written seven years ago, its original vocals still intact. Others are brand new, the product of a year spent bouncing between New York and Philadelphia, painting, playing basketball and trying to carve out some semblance of routine in a life that’s anything but.
“I work from home nowadays, so I wanted to consider what people listen to at particular times of day,” he says. “Whether that’s active listening or just passive, I think a lot of people obviously listen passively. But it was an interesting idea that felt very much relatable to where I was at with my everyday.”
If you’re picturing a tortured artist hunched over a piano at 3 a.m., think again. Karpeh’s process is more like a creative scavenger hunt, digging through old demos and half-finished ideas, reimagining them for a new context.
“My process changed in the sense that it required a lot more digging and a lot more re-imagining of some things that I may have had for years, or some things that maybe I just made, but I had to determine what time that felt like.”
The Sound
If Karpeh’s last project, KARPEH, was a collaborative, live-band affair, The Hours: Morning is its introverted cousin. Most of the album was made at home, with Karpeh playing mad scientist, pulling in collaborators where it made sense but mostly trusting his own instincts.
“It was a little bit more of my alternative way of making things,” he says. “I was also picking up older songs or things that I’d had for a while, or maybe I hadn’t necessarily seen in a particular way until now.”
The result is an album that feels both intimate and expansive, like a private conversation that just happens to be set to a killer soundtrack. There’s a looseness to these songs, a sense that they’re unfolding in real time, capturing the weird, in-between and intimate moments that make up a day.
“A lot of things for me have always been consistent sonically,” Karpeh says. “There are certain elements of my style as a musician and as an artist that are just consistent throughout no matter what song I’m making. And then some things, even just as production goes, things kind of change year to year.”
The Message
So what’s the deeper meaning behind all this? Is The Hours: Morning a meditation on the passage of time, a treatise on mindfulness, a call to arms for the perpetually distracted?
Kind of, but not really.
“I was purposefully not trying to have a super deep overarching message,” Karpeh says, almost sheepishly. “I mean, I’ve done that in my last album, right? Maybe I’ll do it again, but I think I wanted to make something that felt emotional, but not so deeply personal to me because I think I’d already done something to that nature.”
Instead, the album is full of little moments — karaoke at 5 a.m., a smoke break, the chaos of morning traffic — that feel both specific and universal.
“I very much wanted to relate specific things that can sort of happen throughout the day as an element of concept, but not necessarily … you know, and there’s some songs that are about love and just the connection, like ‘No Champagne’ as in like, we don’t need to get married for me to be connected to you in any deeper way.”
It’s an album that encourages you to be present, to slow down, to actually notice the hours as they pass instead of letting them blur together in a haze of notifications and to-do lists.
“Let’s be more present. Let’s focus on what we’re doing right now,” Karpeh says. “That’s really at the crux of The Hours, because there is such a go, go, go type of pace that people are experiencing. And their brains have to be in so many different places. I felt like it would be nice to make something that felt like we’re acknowledging time, but we’re not going to try to pressure it.”
The Irony
Here’s the kicker: Karpeh is, by his own admission, terrible with time.
“I do think about time a lot. I’m also very bad with time. So it’s kind of hilarious that I’m making an album about it,” he laughs. “I went to college for international affairs. I worked in real estate for two years. I became a full-time musician at 23. I’m 32 now.”
If you’re in your 20s or 30s and feeling the existential pressure to have it all figured out, Karpeh gets it. He’s been there himself, but he makes it clear that he’s not here to sell you some self-help platitude about “living in the moment.”
He’s just trying to make music that feels honest, that captures the weirdness and beauty of being alive right now.
“I’ve worked really hard over the last eight, nine years to let things come to me, but also be present with the people I’m with. And things have worked out, you know? So I guess I just try to not get too pressure-y.
“I think we all deal with an element of anxiety and comparisons, and different things that come in and out of our heads,” he continued. “But if you’re able to pace yourself and try to just focus on yourself in some capacity, that’s only going to help.”
The Future
If The Hours: Morning feels like the start of something bigger, that’s because it is. Are there more “hours” to come?
“There are other hours, 100%,” Karpeh says, grinning. “It’s kind of going to be leading into my overall overarching theme. The plan is to have a really interesting tour as well. We’re going to be doing a very curated kind of presentation and show. I’m very excited to be showing it. I think it’s going to be a very specific, cool thing.”
There will be visual elements, too — more than just the usual lights and smoke machines.
“We’re going in on it,” he promises. “I always try to really go in on the concept of what we’re seeing. Like, it’s obviously a show, but there are also other things that you could be looking at, which I just find to be really fun. So I kind of got really creative with how this is going to look, and I’m excited.”
The tour kicks off Sept. 30, and if the album is any indication, it’s going to be a trip — a chance to step outside the relentless march of time and just, you know, be.
