Indie rock group Clementine Was Right is the songwriting project led by Denver-based poet and fiction writer Mike Young who is preparing to release 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? A colorful nine-song due out Friday, March 11, 2022.
After releasing three books of poems and stories in the early 2010s (with praise from VICE, BOMB, The Believer, and others), 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, which I featured on the Adobe & Teardrops podcast. 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.”
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.
In our discussion, Young tells us more about his influences and what, exactly, draws him to country music.
Does your album have an overarching theme?
Probably it’s right there in the chorus of the title track: “If I can’t get right with the darkness / let me get right with the rest.” There’s a lot of wandering and promising and trying to do trust falls—or maybe, more honestly, trying to test trust, trying to ask people the right questions to see if you can fall off the edge of the world with them. Or at least dance in a different town.
There’s another line in the title track of Can’t Get Right With the Darkness that goes “I’ve seen lightning that can’t decide / whether it’s just showing off.” And there was a lightning storm on a driftwood beach in Georgia, Jekyll Beach, late at night. That storm was sort of a bridge between our first record, Lighting & Regret, which was more about protesting the darkness, and this one, which is more about trying to figure out how to give up with grace.
This storm in Georgia was poking at the beach but moving further and further out into the Atlantic. I remember how restless the lightning seemed, how you have to respect the way life can reach down and ruin things in a blink and still feel like it has some mysterious work to do.
Destruction and loss and sudden cracks of light: can you make a story out of them? Can you understand anything by what they brighten up? Or you keep riding and trying to stay open and vulnerable among the chaos and the tragedy—and remember there are other people wincing there next to you, and they in fact are more important than the storm.
What have you missed about touring?
All of it! I miss wearing one pair of jeans for a dignified reason. All the in-jokes, the incessant reconfigurations of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Snake Farm” to fit any two syllable phrase. I miss the strangers and the friends, seeing different trees and oceans. I miss the rhythm of seeing music every night, singing every night. Locking into these moments of breath and melody that can’t be subdivided.
We had to cancel our tour for our first record, Lighting and Regret, at the burst of the pandemic in 2020. And that was a really rough time. My friend Molly passed away in a pretty tragic way, right at the beginning of March 2020, while we were on the road. I couldn’t go to her funeral because of lockdown confusion and panic. And then my dad passed away in February 2021. I felt often like giving up, but the idea of getting back out was a big thing that kept me going.
I’ve more or less rebuilt my life with my wonderful partner, the poet Gion Davis, but it’s been a forest of grief, for sure. Being on the road doesn’t fix any of it, but it’s easier to let things finally move through you when you yourself are moving through the landscape—and pouring it out every night.
Have you ever been star-struck when playing with a musician?
Back in 2019, we were coming back from a pretty brutal first ever tour on the West Coast. Naively, I’d routed us through the mountains in February. Oops. So we had some gnarly snowstorms, especially the last drive from Utah to New Mexico. We saw a semi driver just standing on the side of the road, clutching his head, staring at his truck rolled in the ditch.
But we made it back to Santa Fe in time to open for David Dondero, one of my favorite songwriters and an inspiration to me as a teenager stuffed up in rural Northern California, pirating albums on a very slow internet connection and feeling very grateful for the storytelling, the urgent “I could whisper this but instead I’m going to bark it” that I’d found my way into through Bright Eyes and then deeper through folks like Dondero. So it was a trip to shake the snow off and watch him get up there and humbly play all those songs in a Santa Fe brewery that sounded just like me at 3AM alone in my teenage bedroom with the garbage bag curtains.
Where are some places you’ve found joy within the country/Americana world?
I’ve been lucky to play with some wonderful queer country musicians, like Jude Brothers, Lisa Kori, and Nate Smerage in the band right now, who routinely challenge the aesthetic and social boundaries of country music. There is of course such an incredible lineage of queer country, and I would not be the first or the smartest person to put a magnifying glass to the cocaine and rhinestones of the genre and report that it’s always been a complicated stew.
If I can be reductive for a sentence about that complicated stew, I will say this: there is a cleverness in country music I respect, a sort of resourceful evasiveness, that pops up sometimes even in the corniest country music. I think there is a somewhat winding but clear connection between surviving in this brutal world and a stupid pun like “if I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me.” I think some of the simplest and most beautiful moments in country music feel like locking eyes across the room and sharing some coded wink, knowing what someone else is thinking, even if it wouldn’t be the best idea to say those things out loud in that particular dark and/or smoky room. Some of this also bleeds into the idea of folk music, the connective tissue of “we’ve never met, but I also know that melody”—but some of it is anti-folk, I think, in that it remembers and respects that we’re all ultimately different and mysterious and we shouldn’t ever try to cram our radical alterity into any fascist vision of “shared norms.”
Two books that I love (and that readers of A&T probably already know about): Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs and the Mark Allan Jackson-edited anthology The Honky Tonk on the Left. Also a big fan of Country Soul by Charles Hughes, which complicates the conventional history of racial music genre divisions among session players in Memphis, Nashville, and New Orleans.
Have you ever been given something remarkable by a fan?
During lockdown, along with pining to get back on the road and trying to convince life to stop killing my friends and family, I was lucky enough to find a lovely community of folks online. This was and is through TikTok—sort of a surprise for me! But people seemed to really connect with me stitching poems and pawn shop vacation videos and music together into these little minute-long bursts. Honestly I kind of love the message-in-a-bottle (in a sea of bottles) feel of it. For a while there in the thick of lockdown, TikTok did exactly what social media supposedly does not do: made me feel less alone.
Through those connections, we put together a collaborative music video for our song “Outside of Reno” with a series of ridiculous prompts, gathering little videos of people with disco balls in bathtubs and eating popsicles on the roof of a hearse. Circling back to that idea of coded winks, this experiment was like the embodiment of everything I love about music and art and strangers. It’s like when David Berman sang that he was working at the airport bar and it was like “Christmas in a submarine”—it feels incredible to say something like that, something from the most specific backwaters of your imagination, and have other people out there in the world go “oooh, I know what you mean.”
So making that video with people and feeling seen, feeling like there were people out there who understood these stories around the fire that I can’t pin the origin of even as I’m telling them. And not only did folks understand them, but they were in fact ready to re-tell them, make them their own—that sort of beefy version of “singing along” is how I’ve always connected to art, and having people connect to my own songs in that way is probably the biggest thing of all that keeps me going.
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