Josh Clayton-Felt (May 18, 1967 – January 19, 2000) was an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He co-founded the alternative rock band School of Fish and later embarked on a solo career.
Biography
Early years
Clayton-Felt was one of two children along with his sister Laura born to Jewish parents Marilyn (1938-2006),[2] a playwright and John J. Clayton, a writer.[3][4] His parents later divorced and his mother would eventually remarry Henry Felt, a folk musician who exposed Clayton-Felt to the works of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. At the age of 17, Clayton-Felt visited Israel, writing about his experiences.[5] He grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston. He later enrolled at Brown University.
Josh Clayton-Felt and Michael Ward founded the band School of Fish that went on to musical success in America in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s.
Solo career
After the breakup of School of Fish, Clayton-Felt released an album independently in 1994, and landed a deal with A&M Records in 1996. His album, Inarticulate Nature Boy, was released in February 1996.[6] It scored airplay on college radio, with the track "Window" reaching No. 49 on Radio & Records' Alternative chart, and led to tours with Tori Amos and Del Amitri.[7] The record did not sell well and Clayton-Felt was dropped; he had been writing a follow-up record, to be titled Center of Six, which he continued to work on in 1998 and 1999 with session drummer Steve Scully.
In December 1999, while still writing for the album, Clayton-Felt was diagnosed with choriocarcinoma,[4] a rare form of a particularly aggressive testicular cancer[8] with the worst prognosis of all germ-cell cancers.[9] He died a month later at the age of 32.[4] Robert B. Weide delivered the eulogy at Clayton-Felt's funeral, in early 2000.[4]
