In an already storied career on stage and screen, Claybourne Elder has earned Grammy, SAG, and Drama Desk Award nominations, sung with symphony orchestras and Broadway divas, and soloed at Carnegie Hall.

Yet, the performer, known for theater roles on and off Broadway, and as the ill-fated John Adams on HBO’s The Gilded Age, had never released a solo album, until now, with his sparkling debut If the Stars Were Mine. The question for some might be, if not necessarily what took so long, why now?

“I think that there have been several times I’d thought about doing it,” Elder tells me during a relaxed chat over Zoom. “And I was like, ‘Oh, no. I mean, who wants to listen to it?’ The kind of imposter syndrome gets to you, and you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t want to.'” There’s also the challenge, he acknowledges, of working out what you might want to say over an album’s worth of songs.

“As an actor, you get so used to being the paint on someone else’s canvas that doing something that is entirely you is scary, and so I think that that had kind of stopped me. But I think as I’m getting older, and getting more experience in my career, I’m more confident and ready to share myself, ready to share true parts of me, not just what a character is written for.”

Still, many of the songs on the album were written for a character in a show, like album opener “Something’s Coming,” from West Side Story, or “Moments in the Woods,” from Into the Woods. And there are pop covers — a tender ballad take on “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” — along with revved-up standards like “I Wanna Be Evil,” and a gorgeously twangy version of the SteelDrivers’ “Lonesome Goodbye.”

As a vocalist, Elder applies his artistry — and the buttery smooth arrangements by his music director Rodney Bush and album co-producer Bryan Perri — to interpret each song as something intimately personal to him, as a self-described “nice, gay ex-Mormon dad.”

“Every song is like a journal entry,” he says. “They all say something about me. If you listen through the whole thing, I think you’d get a good sense of who I am. It’s like hanging out with me for an hour.” That intimacy and openness harkens back to where this album started, as a frank and bawdy cabaret performance that Elder developed with Bush, and debuted a few years ago.

He’s been performing and touring it ever since, on and off, between projects like co-starring in New York City Center’s well-received revival of The Wild Party, and shooting season three of The Gilded Age, where his courageously gay John Adams suffered perhaps last year’s most shocking TV death.

Balancing all that with raising a young son with director-playwright husband Eric Rosen, Elder has also found time to work on his next solo cabaret show, possibly yielding another album.

So, while listeners are still discovering the qualities of this debut, he’s already plotting the follow-up. “I have some other projects coming up, but that’s the thing I’m most excited about,” he enthuses. “Because I love the form so much of being in front of an audience, and sharing that with them is a very exciting thing for me.”

METRO WEEKLY: When we last talked to you, in January 2024, you were touring If The Stars Were Mine as a cabaret show. Did you know then that you were going to record it as an album?

CLAYBOURNE ELDER: I had had several people ask me where they could hear these arrangements of the songs, because I tried to come up with new or different ways to do the songs, and I kept saying, “I don’t know, nowhere.” Finally, enough people started asking me that I was like, “I wonder…,” and somebody actually said, “Have you ever thought of making an album out of it?”

Since becoming a dad, I think a lot more about the things we leave behind. There are a lot of these songs that are kind of songs that I sing to my son or that my son knows, and so I was like, “I think I want to do it. I have this dream that he’s going to play it for his kids.”

MW: How old is your son?

ELDER: He’s eight.

MW: So, eventful years for him, too, I think.

ELDER: Yes, big changes.

MW: Did you include every song from the show?

ELDER: No, and there are a couple of songs that aren’t in the show that are on it. We were in the studio and we ended up with 15 minutes extra time at the end of one day. And studio time is so expensive, I was like, “We’ve got to use every second of time.” I’d been thinking about the song “Till There Was You,” and so I was like, “Everybody, get back in the studio. Here are the chords.” I said to the guitar, “You take the beginning,” and there was piano, “You take a part in the middle. And let’s do the song, but I want it to be a little bit full of longing. I want there to be a little bit of, not just a happy, plunky version of it, but to have some longing in it.”

So we did it, and we did it in one take, and it ended up on the album. I was kind of just like, “Maybe I’ll just include it as a bonus track or something like that,” but then I was like, “No, I think this should be on the album,” so it ended up there.

MW: I really enjoyed that song, and I would not have guessed that it was a one-take thing. There’s a piano solo that comes off really well in that one. I assume that’s Rodney Bush.

ELDER: No, that was actually Adam Birnbaum. I had two different bands. I had one band that played predominantly musical theater things. And then I hired musicians who have a lot of jazz experience to come in to do some of the jazz numbers, kind of at the recommendation of Rodney, actually. He was like, “I don’t do that.” And that’s the thing. Adam Birnbaum is the man who played the piano on “Till There Was You.” Because they’re just so good at it, we could do that. We did it in one take because he’s like, “Yeah, what? This?” and he just could do it. So I feel like I really lucked out with the musicians. I truly got lucky in that a lot of people said yes to joining in.

MW: I want to talk about the arrangements. You do Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and it is distinctly not a dance song. What sort of dance are you longing for?

ELDER: Yeah. Speaking of imposter syndrome. How dare I? A Whitney song? I was like, “Am I really going to do this?” I remember growing up a little gay kid in Utah and hearing that song and thinking, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’ll ever be me. I don’t know that I’ll ever fall in love with somebody or dance with somebody.” So that’s why that song to me has that sort of sadness and longing — I remember being a kid and thinking, “Oh, I don’t know that this sort of love story is ever going to happen to me.” So that’s where it comes from.

MW: I think you did the right thing. You can’t try to out-sing a Whitney Houston song. You gotta do it differently.

ELDER: You gotta do it differently. You’ve got to do it your own way. Right?

MW: That song and on The Baker’s Wife’s “Moments in the Woods,” these are songs that are from a woman’s point of view, and you’re keeping the wording. But obviously, the sexuality changes when we hear a man singing it, which to me sounds natural coming from you. Does it feel that way? Does your record label think so?

ELDER: Yeah. The record label [Center Stage Records] was really, really supportive. They signed on before they knew what I was going to do, before they had a track list. I actually had a relationship with them before from doing another cast album that got nominated for a Grammy [Sondheim Unplugged: The NYC Sessions, Vol. 3]. We had a Grammy nomination together, and that was very exciting, but I just sang some of the tracks on that album. I’m really lucky that they trusted me and just were like, “Yep, do whatever you’re going to do.”

Songs like “Moments in the Woods” — Into the Woods is when I fell in love with theater when I was a kid, and so I’ve been singing that song my whole entire life. To put it on feels very natural to me because it’s like, “Yeah, I’ve been singing it since I was eight.” That one, too, when I do my show, I talk about my first kiss ever with a boy, and that song, that’s what that song means to me. Out of the context of the show, that’s what it means to me.

MW: That’s a nice context, actually, for “Moments in the Woods.” For example, “Man Around the House” sung by a man is unapologetically gay, which is really awesome. You talk about growing up hearing a song like “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and thinking that that doesn’t include you. You’re making music that does include that kid who’s listening somewhere, so how does that feel?

ELDER: That’s true. You know what? A big turning point in me deciding to make the album was somebody said to me — I kind of was like, “Well, who’s going to want to listen to it? It’s such a weird combination of music. It’s theater and jazz and stuff” — and somebody said to me, “I bet Claybourne Elder at 20 would’ve loved that album,” and I was like, “Yep. Yeah, I’m going to do it.” Because gosh, I would’ve loved it. I didn’t hear anything like that when I was [that age]. And we do much more now. It’s not like this is the only gay musical theater album like this, but it’s true that we don’t hear it that much.

MW: I think there’s still pressure, at least in terms of playing roles, to play a certain machismo. Do you feel that pressure as a performer — in particular to project an image for straight female fans?

ELDER: Yeah. I’ve been around for a while, I’m not a kid, but I haven’t been around for that long. And when I started, I had a manager who was like, “Don’t tell anyone you’re gay. If they ask you in an interview, tell them you don’t want to talk about it.” He was very strict about it, and I was like, “No.”

I spent 20 years of my life, 25 years of my life lying to people about it, and that didn’t go over that well for me, and I’m never going to lie about it again. That manager dropped me, and it was a big deal. It was a big, scary thing. I don’t say that as like, “What a hero I am.” Maybe it screwed up my career. Maybe I would’ve been super famous by now or something, be in a Marvel superhero movie, but it was just never going to be me. That was just never going to be me, but I’m not immune to it.

I remember I got my ears pierced two years ago, and I’d wanted to do it for a really long time, but I didn’t do it because I was nervous about how it would be perceived. I don’t think I really was consciously thinking like, “Oh, I don’t want to look too gay.” But I think that was just instilled in me so much as a kid and then as a young person in my career, and then I was so worried about coming across too anything. I think that I’m just at a point in my life now that I care less about what other people think, and I mean that in a friendly way. I don’t mean that in a fuck off way. It’s just that I think that I’ve realized, more than ever in my life, that some things that I thought were going to be my weaknesses are my strengths. And that leaning into those things was how I was going to find the most fulfilling things in my career.

MW: I very recently interviewed David Archuleta.

ELDER: Oh, yeah, Mormon buddy.

MW: He’s ex-Mormon. Well, I don’t know if he would call himself ex-Mormon. He talks a lot about the importance of faith and the difficulty of coming out, being deeply ingrained in Mormon religion and culture, and he just put out a book about it, Devout. I’m wondering, do you get approached by ex-Mormons or gay Mormons, and what do you say to them?

ELDER: I definitely do, and I love it. I love talking to them. It’s like when you grow up in any sort of weird niche community, it’s always comforting when somebody has a similar experience as you. I think that there are some times when those people come to me looking for comfort, but actually I get so much comfort in talking to them that it’s like, “Oh, there are other people who shared my experience, who have gone through the same things.”

Yeah, it’s always moving to me because there’s just a whole unspoken thing that is like, if you say to me you grew up Mormon and you’re gay, I’m like, ‘Oh, I have a whole picture about what that was like for you. I don’t know the specifics, but I know a lot about what that was like for you.’ That’s not true of just Mormons. That’s true of anybody who was in a church community and grew up that way or anything like that. We all find those ways to connect, but particularly with Mormons because it’s such a specific experience.

MW: Have you met Archuleta, by the way?

ELDER: No, I actually don’t know him at all. I’m like, oh, I hope one day I’ll meet him or something, or we would come into contact with each other, because what a cool thing.

MW: I also wanted to ask you about the song “Hey, Kid,” which is a great message from a father to an unborn kid. Obviously, that’s a song you’ve been performing for years, but you’re now watching your kid grow up. How does the meaning of that song shift with time?

ELDER: So that’s from the musical If/Then, which was on Broadway ten years ago, maybe longer. I auditioned for that show, and they gave me that song to sing at the audition. I came in and sang it, and they were like, “You’re a little too young to play Idina Menzel’s husband.” We’re just a little bit too far apart in age, and I was like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” But I kept the song because I was like, “This song is just incredible.”

When I sing it now, I would say it’s the only song that people come up to me after my show and say, “What is that song from?” It’s clearly a theater song. It’s a narrative story thing, and I tell them it’s from If/Then, and people are like, “I saw If/Then. I don’t remember that song at all.” I actually had to go back and look and see if it made it into the show, but I think that it just wasn’t the focus of the show. So when I sing it, people are always so curious about it because it captures that feeling.

Actually, I changed the lyrics of the song. It’s written as a straight man, his wife having a baby, and there’s a lyric in it that says “my pregnant wife,” and I have to say that lyric because it rhymes. But I change one lyric in it. At the end, it says, “Your mom and me will somehow muddle through,” but I change it to “Your dad and me,” so I make it about a gay couple in the end. Every time, it makes me cry, that song.

MW: How does your kid like “Hey Kid?”

ELDER: I don’t know. You know what? He loves to come and see me do my show. But I think he gets embarrassed when I get a little emotional. I used to point and be like, “And my son’s here,” and everybody would clap, and he was like, “Will you not do that anymore? I don’t like it.” Because he doesn’t love the attention of it all, and maybe that will change someday, but he does love having me sing it. He loves listening to my album, which really tickled me. He always wants to listen to it, which really makes me very happy.

MW: Yeah, you should feel lucky that he’ll have anything to do with his dad. Because I see kids, they go through those phases, right?

ELDER: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

MW: One more song from the album — “Lonesome Goodbye.” I really love that song. That’s my vibe there. Talk to me about including “Lonesome Goodbye.”

ELDER: During the pandemic, my music director, Rodney Bush, came to stay at our house upstate. It was right when the pandemic hit. We were like, “Come up to the house.” Because I was in Company at the time, and Company shut down, and so we just went upstate, and I was like, “Rodney, just come to the house because the city’s going to shut down.” He came to stay for a weekend, and ended up staying for four months because everything shut down, and we were like, “Yeah, just live in the extra bedroom.”

We started doing this thing every night called Music Time where, as the sun was setting, we would pull out musical instruments. I played the violin, and Rodney played the guitar, and we would play folk songs and play songs and sing and stuff for an hour or so. At the end of every Music Time, we played “Lonesome Goodbye,” and we played it every day for months and months, every single day for those four months. We sang it hundreds of times, and so I knew that had to be on the album as well.

MW: How did you not get sick of it?

ELDER: Because I love it. I still love it. I still sing it in my shows sometimes and play the violin because it’s an amazing song. It’s an amazing song.

MW: Now, also, when I spoke to you in ’24 —

ELDER: I can’t believe that was two years ago.

MW: So much has gone on since then, and I can only imagine for you with a kid, but you were in the midst of Gilded Age season three, and I don’t know if you knew that John Adams was about to get rocked by the horse-drawn carriage that was heard around the world. When did you know?

ELDER: Well, when they write shows, they plan four or five seasons when they pitch it. There was a show bible, they call it, that has what’s going to happen to everybody in it, and that was what was going to happen to my character. So I knew, but also I was hoping — because it changes all the time. So I knew that was the plan, but I didn’t know if it was going to happen or not. I knew it was coming, but I was still like, “Aw, man.”

HBO didn’t want it to happen, but the writer was like, “This has to happen, or the plot changes,” and you’ll find out more in season four. I was sad. Everyone was very nice and was like, “It’s nothing to do with you. You know that, right?” And I’m like, “I know. It’s not a personal thing. It’s about the story,” but I was sad to see it go because I loved working with the people so much. And I hope now that it’s gone on — they sort of thought maybe the third season was going to be the last season — but it’s gone on, and I’m really happy. I bet they’ll have at least two more, so we’ll see.

MW: Given how the audience reacted — there was a huge reaction — how are you feeling about the purpose that John Adams served on the show?

ELDER: I’m really proud of it. I’m really proud that it was a character who was like, “I’m going to try to live an authentic life.” When asked, he was like, “I don’t know how it’ll work, but I’m going to try. I’m going to try to live this authentic life as best I can and not marry someone for money and get married to a woman.” So I’m proud of it.

I’m also proud that I was an out gay actor playing the gay character on the show. I’m so glad that they did that. When I knew it was coming out, I was like, “Oh, I hope people care. I hope that it matters to people.” I was in Berlin when the episode aired, and I knew it was coming out, but I kind of had forgotten what day because I don’t watch it. It’s not fun to watch — it’s so hard to watch yourself. I went to sleep in Berlin and woke up the next morning, and my phone had just exploded with messages, and I had totally forgotten what it was. I thought a horrible emergency had happened. I was like, “Oh, my god, something horrible has happened. Someone’s dead,” and I was like, “Oh, it’s me. I’m dead.”

And it’s been really fun. People still will yell at me in the street like, “Be careful!” I was in Provincetown. People were pulling me out of the street and being like, “Don’t get hit,” which is very funny. It’s sweet that it resonated with people. I’m just glad that people cared, that people were sad about it.

MW: Yeah, it could have gone down differently. Also, it’s on a short list for me. I’ve watched a lot of TV in my time. Of those, L.A. Law, Roz falling down the elevator shaft.

ELDER: Yeah!

MW: That was mind-blowing. And this is up there with that for me.

ELDER: Oh, good. I’m glad. What a way to go, right?

MW: Now, on the subject of living authentically, it’s almost your birthday.

ELDER: Yeah, it is.

MW: Do you look forward to birthdays? Do you dread them?

ELDER: I like birthdays. Patti LuPone and I have the same birthday, and we’ve celebrated our birthday together a couple of times, which is fun. It’s fun to have somebody to celebrate your birthday on the same day with, because it’s like, “Oh, fun.” It makes it less about you. It’s just like, “Let’s get together and have a party.”

I also like other people’s birthdays. I love baking, I love baking cakes, so I’m always looking for a reason to bake a cake. So I love other people’s birthdays too, because I love to bake.

MW: Oh, what’s the next cake on the menu?

ELDER: Oh, my gosh, I don’t know. I’ll bake my own birthday cake because I like to, and I’m probably going to bake a carrot cake.

MW: What cake does Patti LuPone like?

ELDER: We went to Balthazar and just got giant seafood towers. I don’t think we even got cake this last time. We just got a whole bunch of crab legs and lobster.

MW: Now, something I have to get in print because you brought her up: Patti LuPone. Actually, the very last cover interview I did was Patti LuPone.

ELDER: Oh, my gosh.

MW: But because the show, the performance, that she was promoting was postponed — her Matters of the Heart tour — we don’t know when it’s going to run. We’re sitting on it. As somebody who was nervous going into that interview and it went very well, I’m like, “Agh!”

ELDER: Yeah. I’m sorry for you because that sucks that it’s like you can’t do anything about it, but it’s like, “I did it, I did the thing, this cool thing.”

MW: Exactly, exactly. So I take it you guys had a good time in Company?

ELDER: Yeah. She was amazing in Company. She was so good to all the cast members. The stars of Broadway shows often have two dressing rooms because they’re so small. They’ll have the dressing room, and they’ll have a little lounge kind of area. She didn’t use her second dressing room. Instead, she turned it into a bar that was just for the cast and crew. And she put couches in it and got all the booze and snacks we wanted. She just always wanted us to hang out because she just wanted us to be together. It was so wonderful.

She was always so generous to everybody. She gave everybody Tiffany’s jewelry for opening night. She was so kind, and I know she has a spicy personality. I also just worked with Tonya Pinkins [in The Wild Party], who is unbelievable. I’m always the person who wants to go to the oldest person in the room and just be like, “Tell me stories,” and so I always get along with those people, and Tonya Pinkins has the most amazing stories. But also has a tricky personality sometimes. I challenge anyone who’s an actress who lived through the ’80s and ’90s to not be tough. You had to be oversexualized, paid less than everyone else, had to fight tooth and nail, fight off producers and sexual advances. I’m like, “Yeah, you have to be really tough to make it.” All those women that made it, I’m like, “I’m not surprised if you were a little bit careful.” So yeah, but I love Patti so much. She’s coming to my show next week.

MW: Oh, good. I feel like you were about to say “broads.”

ELDER: Broads? Yeah. Those theater broads, yeah, I like that. I love theater broads. Betty Buckley!

MW: Well, you’re talking about Patti, Betty, Tonya Pinkins. Do you have any other dream collaborators, anybody out there that you really would love to work with at some point?

ELDER: Cole Escola. That’s who I want.

MW: That’s a good one.

ELDER: Unhinged and very funny and fun, I would love that. Let’s dream big.

MW: Let’s manifest that one.

ELDER: Manifest.

MW: Are you a Clay or a Claybourne?

ELDER: People call me Clay. I go by Claybourne professionally because it’s my family name, it’s an old family name, but Clay is what everybody calls me.

MW: As we approach that birthday, what’s something that you are hoping is going to happen in the coming year?

ELDER: Well, so I’ve been touring around this one show for three years now, and I never intended to do it for that long, but people kept booking it. And it’s a show that I really sat down and wrote. People joke that it’s kind of like my TED Talk. It’s somewhere between a stand-up comedy show and a TED Talk with songs. I’ve written my next one, which I’ve been very nervous about writing because this one really was so personal to me. Now I’ve finally written the next one, and I’m going to start performing it next year. I’m very excited and very nervous about that, because it’s equally emotional and vulnerable and really just parts of me on the stage.

MW: Do you have a title that you’ll share?

ELDER: Not yet. I’m still finishing it, and the title says so much about what it is that I’m being very careful about titling it.

MW: And will that be another album?

ELDER: Maybe. That’s the thing. I don’t know. I will say, now that I’ve done it, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. It is thrilling. It’s so fun, and hard,” but I’d like to say that I will do it again sometime.

MW: Did you consider including any of the spoken portions of the show on the album? Because I feel like I was missing it.

ELDER: Yeah, I did. I think there is a chance that there’s going to be a deluxe version of the album that comes out that has the spoken tracks, the spoken stuff on it as well. That might happen.

MW: Well, I would listen.

ELDER: Yeah? All right. There we go. Then maybe I need to.

If the Stars Were Mine is available wherever you purchase or stream music. Visit the official store at broadwayrecords.com.

Follow Claybourne Elder on Instagram at @claybourneelder.

And here’s a little treat from our cover shoot with Claybourne in 2016, when he starred in Passions at Signature Theatre: