Sweet Dreams Nadine – “Indigo”

Sweet Dreams Nadine – “Indigo”

In a few weeks, Sweet Dreams Nadine — the brainchild of Brooklyn musicians Nadia Hulett, Carlos Hernandez, and Julian Fader — are releasing a new eponymous album, their first since changing their name from just Nadine. We’ve heard two tracks from it already, “Weird Love” and “Painted Blue,” and today they’re back with one more, “Indigo.”

“‘Indigo’ was originally a little two-chord noodle that we created over a drum loop sampled from the beginning of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Prove Your Love,” Fader said in a statement to Under The Radar. I personally hadn’t known this song until Nadia showed it to me — it’s a Christine McVie banger buried on the B side of 1974’s Heroes Are Hard To Find — but I was immediately taken by the drum break that starts the song.” He continued:

With just four bars of kick snare and hi-hat, Mick Fleetwood communicates all of the resignation, the longing, the understanding that the song suggests as it unfolds. It’s frankly incredible and we knew pretty quickly that we wanted some of That. We built the bones of ‘Indigo’ around a lightly sped-up sample of that drum opening, borrowing that cloudy feel for our own song. Eventually, it came time to replace Mick’s drums with my own and I received another humbling lesson about the difference between goodness and greatness. No matter how much I tried to keep my kick drum foot ahead of the beat just so while letting the snare lay back in the rhythm, as Mick does, I couldn’t get it right. In the end, the drums are my feel and my part and not Mick’s and that’s fine. I’m not British, I wasn’t born at the tail end of WWII, I am not dating (and cheating on) my bandmates.

Once we had the rhythm for this song worked out, the rest of it fell together easily. Carlos wrote a moody bridge and then added these exquisite intertwining guitar parts to the verses. I added some Hammond organ and played an acoustic guitar in Nashville tuning. Nadia laid in these absolutely perfect, longing, yearning vocals and added the relevant harmonies. Then you know, we sat on the song for a while. We let it simmer. We mixed it. We sent it off to the good folks at Dear Life Records. And now it’s here for you.

Check it out below.

Sweet Dreams Nadine is out 4/14 via Dear Life Records. They’ll be playing an album release show the night before (4/13) at Purgatory in Brooklyn.

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