#hearitfirst latest from Clementine Was Right
Photo Credit: Gion Davis
NASHVILLE, TN (January 7, 2022) — Clementine Was Right, the indie rock project led by Denver-based poet and fiction writer Mike Young, have released “Dreaming of Dancing in a Different Town.” The song — highlighted with pensive storytelling — marks the lead off single from Can’t Get Right With the Darkness, the band’s sophomore LP offering.
Chronicling years of uprooting — from Northern California to New England and Alaska to New Mexico — the music gallops and sways through hook-smeared bootgaze, cosmic scoot, harmonizing and storytelling. The outcome? Can’t Get Right With the Darkness, a colorful nine-song collection due out Friday, March 18.
According to Young, “‘Dreaming of Dancing in a Different Town’ is about the ache of naive promises. You start out flirting and trading clove cigarettes outside the laser tag place, jumping off the rail bridge, and you end up running into someone years later and admitting you never understood why they were crying.”
After releasing three books of poems and stories in the early 2010s (with praise from media outlets such as VICE), Young moved to Santa Fe in 2016 and instituted the Clementine Was Right journey with fifteen years of songs. In February 2020, these songs came together as the band’s first LP — Lightning & Regret — featuring a mix of innovative styles and instrumentation, from swirling honky-tonk synths to urgent crunchy guitars and accordions.
In September 2021, Clementine Was Right huddled into Memphis Magnetic Recording in Memphis, TN to record Can’t Get Right With the Darkness. The new record is both grizzlier and more anthemic, weeping and laughing while the fire jumps the river. Recorded straight to a 1969 Ampex tape machine, the new sonic experience takes a smoke break outside the question of retro vs. contemporary, coming back inside with a bootgaze take on Gram Parsons’s infamous “cosmic American music.”
Inspiration for the LP’s title came about as a result of the “deaths of family and friends, grief and abandonment — plenty of darkness to get right with,” discloses Young. “In the end, the album is less about the rest and more about the restlessness.”
Jude Brothers and Lisa Kori join Young for colorful three-part harmonies on momentous choruses and catchy bridges, while Nate Smerage’s guitar lines skate between rhythm and lead, reinventing tasty punk-country licks with the sparkle of 80s New Wave and Springsteen bombast.
Dick Darden decorates the beat like a rhinestone Charlie Watts, and Hayden Johnson’s breezy galumph on bass keeps both joy and desperation close to the heart. Rounding out the room are Alissa Nordmoe’s contemporary winks and sighs on her 1930s lap steel, haunting the songs with ghosts in many moods. Evolving Mike’s distorted synth washes from the first record, Scott McEwen’s mixes keep things warm and clear, letting the stories and harmony-driven hooks shine through.
Can’t Get Right With the Darkness builds on the promise of Lightning & Regret with bolder joys and darker waves, confidently maturing the band’s vision. “This new record is for dancing even deeper and the different towns you do it in, the strangers you made along the way and the candles you don't know how to hold,” Young says.
Can’t Get Right With the Darkness is composed of Mike Young (vocals), Jude Brothers (vocals), Lisa Kori (vocals/ keyboard), Nate Smerage (guitar), Dick Darden (drums), Hayden Johnson (bass), Alissa Nordmoe (steel), and Buck Williams (road guitar).
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