Press: jamie@noearbuds.com
Everything else: clementinewasright@gmail.com

Clementine Was Right is the songwriting project of poets Mike Young and Gion Davis. Chronicling years of uprooting—from Northern California to New England, Alaska to New Mexico—the music gallops and sways through hook-smeared bootgaze and western emo.

After releasing three books of poems and stories in the early 2010s (with praise from VICE, BOMB, The Believer), Mike started Clementine Was Right in 2018 as a return to songwriting.

The band is based in Denver and features an orchard of collaborators from the Sierra Nevadas to the Ozarks, complicating and queering the lineage of "country music" with yokel fuzz.

Tell Yourself You’re Going Home

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What are you supposed to miss? What do you really miss? Burnt down olive orchards, mysterious friendships, mothers washing their boots in the sea, attics full of Barbie limousines.

Our third LP, Tell Yourself You’re Going Home, is a breakup letter to growing up, being stuck, rural California, not having a place to go home to, and boys who jump in the river forever. It sounds like Wilco if they couldn't afford dentists. It sounds like Titus Andronicus chasing Roy Orbison’s ghost through the fuzz.

Recorded over the course of several years and state lines, these 9 songs (and 1 poem by Gion) feature 30 of our dearest pals from all our places. The songs have trumpets and pedal steel and different drummers and everything we know about the way the blood in your head feels when you hang upside down off a train bridge at night.

We made this record in Memphis. We made this record in Denver. We made this record for the kitchens of all our friends. We made this record for our dead dads. For when you can’t smell the fentanyl behind the t-ball tee. For summer wind, blackjack scams, scarecrows in the tire stacks, and bad ideas in cowboy boots. We were never taught how to stand on dust. We made our home where our friends all were, but then our friends went home.

Can’t Get Right With the Darkness

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For the last song, everybody sings: “if I can't get right with the darkness / let me get right with the rest.” Before that, we sing about feathers on the river and stealing a dump truck. We know the heart is just a tenant. You can pack the rain in the smell of your coat, and we'll promise to meet you on the next bus out.

But first we're trapped in Joe Montana’s yokel war. In an old tire store, we dance with St Francis and his wolves.

Recorded live to a 1969 Ampex tape machine at Memphis Magnetic with Scott McEwen, the band’s second LP is both grizzlier and more anthemic, weeping and laughing while the fire jumps the river. Moving against grief, the songs try to get right with both the rest and the restlessness.

The record features Jude Brothers (vocals/production), Dick Darden (drums/vocals), Gion Davis (vocals/production), Hayden Johnson (bass), Lisa Kori (vocals), Alissa Nordmoe (steel/vocals), Nate Smerage (lead guitar), Buck Williams (road guitar), and Mike Young (vocals/guitar/production).

A second 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.

• Under the Radar said: “The whole band locks into place with near-effortless chemistry… weaving together galloping rhythms, warm honky-tonk guitars, and sweet three-part harmonies, a marriage of heartland rock and rambling alt-country.”

• Twangville said: “Their latest album is filled with wanderlust … the lyrics are brought to life with catchy melodies and ramshackle arrangements that add to their charm.”

• Alt77 said: “A glam-country hybrid that hits the soft spot … It’s poetry and it’s glamorous pop music.”

• American Pancake said: “Heartfelt, busted up storytelling … wonderful glimpses of relationships full of longing, lost moments, bruised and torn.”

• Various Small Flames said: “The songs are at once more rugged and joyous than the previous album, leaving no emotion untapped as they aim to paint the most vivid version of each story.”

• Americana Highways said: “Connects immediately with a carefree energy.”

• AltCountry.NL said: “Young's lyrics are fairly inimitable ... The whole thing is a bit rattling (in a good way).”

Outside of Reno

As a final wave to our first record—and a thank you to the friends we made in 2020—we invited people in June 2021 to help us make a collaborative video for a song about ghosts in a bathroom on the Donner Pass.

All the mysteries are a little goofy. Argentina shows up. Italy, Australia, Wales, and Texas all show up. There's a train and a doughnut and a disco ball in a bathtub.

Watch it yourself, see if you can figure out how they keep that bathroom so bright, even after you jog back to the car, drive all night on I-80, rotate your heart like a Rubik's cube of old promises, thank all the ghosts, hey thank you ghosts!

Huge thanks to our friends and stars and everyone who participated: Gion Davis, Lisa Kori, Nate Smerage (the quilter of the guitar solo), Trey Dodson (the cowboy dreaming the road), Caroline Kane, Halley Linscheid, Jude Brothers, Cortni Wimberley, Emma Crocker, Lily Roberts, Jillian Mae, Hope Burrows, Aust, Kris, Connor, Bobby Dixon, Kate Ten Eick, Cole Kilhoffer, Courtney Haubert, Julianna Lucas, Fey Nixx, Maddie Dayton, Lia Burrows, Jef Caine, Kayla Klavins, Gracie Maren Tidwell, LuLu KM, Alex, Grace Williamson, Cody Roberts, Virginia Truman Saft, Violet Goodwin, Maggie, Hailee, Shyla, Avery, Halley Linscheid, and Kat!

Lightning & Regret

Lightning & Regret is made of nine songs about loss and tacos on two coasts.

The songs tell stories about distances you never learn to trust, seventh grade boys wearing their black lipstick, the P.E. coach's bones, the fire of forgiveness, extra potatoes, driving a Volvo to the doughnut store, and lightning storms.

It sounds a little bit like Mojave 3 telling a story to Magnolia Electric Co. about The Wallflowers trying to impress Neko Case by covering The Cure.

The album features Lisa Kori (keys and vocals), Taylor Penner-Ash (drums), Nich Quintero (bass), and Nate Smerage (guitar). It was recorded and mixed by Ben Clary at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe, NM and mastered by Will Dyar. The cover art is by LK James with photos by Gion Davis.

For the ideal listening experience, we recommend sitting in your converted tool shed of a bedroom in a town with casinos and meth and garbage bag curtains, singing along to "If you can hear me / you can see that / I am more than smoke" and then writing the song that comes next.

What People Say

• Adobe & Teardrops said: “exquisite storytelling … one of those albums that helps you expand on how you perceive the world, be more observant, and take note of things you might’ve passed by.”

• Pitchfork writer and poet/musician Brian Howe said: “Mike’s mix of stories, songs, and audience-participation poems with things to touch and hold is authentic without pretension, inviting without presumption, funny without irony, stylized without deception, and genuinely warm and present.”

• AltCountryNl said (in Dutch): “We like it … country rock with shoegaze guitar walls in a tidy way, and here and there a synthesizer shoot.”

• The Santa Fe Reporter said: “lyric-driven boogie that shimmers with haunted grit.”

• The Portland Mercury said: “intimate country-tinged garage pop.”

• Awkward San Diego said: “emotionally-charged alt-country that’s the perfect soundtrack for recollecting your past mistakes and triumphs.”

• Tinnitist said: “hazy melancholia and cyclonic intensity of mind-blowingly great roots-rock gadflys.”

• One morning, after a show in front of a creek, someone texted: “I was drunk last night, but I meant it when I said your songs are still with me."

The Band

The band is a queer country collective that plays electric guitars and tom mallets and accordions and glitter. But the band is also everyone who dances or scribbles a regret or draws a cartoon based on a poem or feeds the ghosts outside of Reno a video of themselves eating a popsicle on a white hearse.

The cowboy boots are from the Sierra Nevadas, but the tears are from New Mexico, but the water is off through the Ozarks, and the snow is down from the Rockies.

Mike and the band have shared bills with Pearl Charles, David Dondero, Sadie Dupuis (of Speedy Ortiz), Nat Baldwin (of Dirty Projectors), and many others.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Clementine Was Right in one season or another:

Aaron Blumenthal, Jude Brothers, Cecilia Ann Burton, Adam Cabrera, Jef Caine, Ben Clary, Dick Darden, Gion Davis, Alec Doniger, Peter Duggan, Will Dyar, Dan Freeman, Annie Garcia-Campos, Bethany Holden, LK James, Hayden Johnson, Kabby Kabakoff, Dave Knodle, Lisa Kori, Carlin Mackie-Stephenson, Paris Mancini, Riley Merino, Alissa Nordmoe, Kole Oakes, Lilia Paskiewicz, Taylor Penner-Ash, Nich Quintero, Julia Strauss, James Williams, The Cinnamon Urns, the feeders of the ghosts in the bathroom on the Donner Pass, and the harmonizers (both with voices and videos) of the “Long Way Home.”

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