“Corduroy Couch” is the latest single from rising UK act Brown Horse. There’s a great, uplifting energy in this engaging return from a band developing a real following. The interplay and contrast between the singers is especially effective while there are absorbing interludes on the keys and electric guitar, lifted by warm bass and bouncing rhythms.
Lyrically, “Corduroy Couch” is intriguing, with a stream of narrative details placing us in the song’s poetic world: “The leaves of a fern // Rustle in the passenger seat // I saw you walking in a long t-shirt // As I was driving by the beach // We watched The Matrix on a corduroy couch // The smell of the ocean was drying on your skin // Your big retriever’s name was Hank // And I know I’ll miss him.” Directed by Alistair Nicholls, the style of the video creates the sense of old, discovered footage and distant memory while the various views of the band also lighten the atmosphere, fitting well with the song’s upbeat rhythm and feel.
Songwriter Nyle Holihan says of “Corduroy Couch”: “The song draws from a couple sources, the most literal being my memory as a young teenager in the attic listening to worn out Talking Heads and R.E.M. tapes on my parents’ big old beige sofa. Hopefully some of the angular fuzziness of those albums carries through. I also took a lot of inspiration from the great short stories in Joy Williams’ ‘The Visiting Privilege’. She writes with amazing precision and communicates mood and atmosphere incredibly visually despite the sparseness of her prose. I tried to emulate a little of that in the verses.”
The single is the first from the Brown Horse’s sophomore album, “All The Right Weaknesses”, which is due for release on Loose Music on 4th April 2024 and will be followed up by a UK tour in April and May. After an extensive European tour, the band returned to Sickroom Studios in Norfolk where they swiftly put together eleven songs in live takes over the course of a week. It’s an energetic follow-up to the band’s acclaimed debut, “Reservoir”, which, in contrast, took years to come together. The band explain: “We’d been on the road in Europe for over two months by the time we arrived at the studio to start recording. We were pretty much constantly together, spending hours in the van listening to the same music, exploring unfamiliar places and playing shows almost every night. That was sort of the creative justification for playing so many dates ahead of recording, to find that level of coherence. We didn’t need to pay for rehearsal space – we rotated new songs in the setlist and learned them on our rare days off. We’d slept on floors and in construction sites, caught midnight ferries, driven a Ford Transit past incredible Norwegian fjords and been towed from a snowbank in the middle of nowhere by a man in shorts and flip flops. It was pretty cool to be that tuned into each other, and have that shared experience going into recording an album.” The resulting collection is a dynamic blend of guitars, accordion, banjo and pedal steel, together creating full, textured and distinctive sound. Enjoy.
