Sloan Brothers share video for the warmly heartbreaking “Love You So Good”
On May 13, Sloan Brothers will release their new album, System Update, via Science Project Records. The project of Athens, Georgia musician Sloan Simpson, System Update features collaborations with other Athens-based musicians, including members of Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Drive-By Truckers, Cracker and more. Today, Simpson shares a new video from the upcoming album, “Love You So Good,” whose list of players includes David Barbe (Sugar), Patterson Hood and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), Robert Schneider (The Apples In Stereo), and Carlton Owens (Cracker). The track is infectiously fuzzy pop with a lot of warmth and sadness alike, with a suitably psychedelic video steeped in visual effects. It’s both heartbreaking and richly accessible, a loving tribute to Simpson’s mother that’ll likely bring a tear to your eye.
Simpson says of the track, “My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was in my twenties. She ended up living for another 20 years, but this song deals with my regret over not knowing how to communicate with her when she was sick, and wishing I could change that now.
“She would say ‘love you so good’ rather than ‘love you so much,’ just as a family Southernism, and it stuck with me again after my sister (a progressive Baptist minister in Michigan) mentioned it in her eulogy at my mother’s funeral.
“I decided to consider the phrase part of my inheritance and built this song around it. All the singers on this (David Barbe, Claire Campbell, Page Campbell, Patterson Hood, and myself) reported choking up when recording their parts.
“I met Jay Gonzalez of Drive-By Truckers when he was playing guitar and keyboards in The Possibilities, and then Nutria. He plays lead guitar on this song as well as piano on its reprise.”
Director Erica Strout adds, “”I did my best to put together something that fit this beautiful song. I recently lost a dear friend, and this ended up feeling like a love letter to her. I wanted to juxtapose ideas of how we experience time, and the confusion and pain associated with reaching out for those we love and not being able to find them anymore. Despite what we are often told, none of it is linear, neither time nor grief. “
Watch the clip for “Love You So Good” below.
Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.