I've never done any Lisp before, is Clojure a good starting candidate?
Yes because it's a very nice language, with lot of bells and whistles. Javascript and Java integration are nearly perfect, allowing you to have a access huge ecosystem. No because even though there's progress regarding the error reporting, it's not always simple to parse them. No because you'll have to understand way more Java than you may be willing to. No because it's not Lisp per se. It's nearly a different beast.
Would I recommend it? YES. But know that "Here be dragons"
It also has support for defining & running 'tasks', which makes it useful as a simple build system.