Nashville’s Night Beds’ Game Changing Single

NIGHT BEDS A.K.A. Winston Yellen

Brooklyn – If yours is the sort of sensibility to be seduced by tell-all compositions that are both lush and sparse, Night Beds could well be your next sonic obsession. Though the band has delivered a torturously miniscule cannon of work since its first album surfaced one year ago, a newly released single, “Me, Liquor And God,” suggests a sea change stirring.

Night Beds is the moniker of Nashville-based Winston Yellen, a new world indie folk/Americana guitarist and vocalist who got his start in fits and bursts. But with one sterling record under his belt, Yellen just released a single that’s a radical departure from past work, and it’s a style that’s likely to lend an unequivocal air of accessibility to his sound.

The band’s first full-length album was Country Sleep, which surfaced in 2013 via Dead Oceans. Yellen had previously unleashed a handful of EPs, all which share the same downbeat tonality of his full-baked record. When we broke the seal on Country Sleep, Pitchfork awarded the album an impressive 7.7 alongside a bevy of complimentary reactions, albeit in a patronizing tone sparked by the album’s sad-steeped balladry.

In fact, Yellen’s threadbare, heart bent lyricism may just be his biggest draw. Responding to Country Sleep, the press evoked multiple associations to Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes). That’s high praise by comparison. And those artists’ work is epically marked by a descent into the deepest depths of vulnerability. It’s the humanity of Justin Vernon’s heartache and the self-reliance and consecration of Pecknold’s tone that draws us in. In his own way, Yellen appropriates these sentiments, and the product is a full-blown Technicolor portrait of the spectrum of romanticism.

This 24-year-old singer/dream weaver was raised in Colorado Springs and relocated to a remote house located in Nashville’s periphery. The pre-civil war home once belonged to Johnny Cash, and it’s there that Yellen devoted ten full months to the writing and recording of Country Sleep.

Two of Yellen’s most telling and persona-cementing tracks born of that epoch were “Even If We Try” and “Was I For You?” Here, we see the artist at the peak of vulnerability, but also at his most serene. This, too, is evident on “Ramona.” Yellen’s got a razor-sharp obsession with the past, and that unrelenting devotion is wildly relatable, if heartbreakingly so. From a compositional perspective, these and others tracks from Yellen’s past reflect the quiet weightiness of personal and persistent rumination.

But on his latest, a curt cut titled “Me, Liquor and God,” Yellen does a radical about-face. A blood-rushing beat permeates the track, complicated by previously untapped synth stylings and an attitudinal charm we only now realize was lacking in prior cuts. “Have I lived enough for myself?” Yellen sings, concluding again and again, “I’ve never lived enough for myself.”

Maybe it was love lost in the wild that hid this side of Yellen until now. Or, perhaps the passing of time revived a secret, steel-cut self-reliance that lay dormant. But regardless, the track sways back to the devotional resilience that defined Country Sleep. “I keep dreaming about you all the damn time,” he confesses, in the bridge that builds to the chorus.

In this way, the roadmap of Yellen’s latest release leads to a profoundly unexpected destination, the fabric of which weaves together his glory-laced sentimentality and newfound resolve. This track jumps the rails on alt folk and stumbles into electronica and R&B territory effortlessly, and will leave you scratching your head over what Night Beds might possibly have on deck. But, ultimately, Yellen’s proven his rage on this one, and the product is fine enough to dream about all the damn time.

Devastatingly, Night Beds has no scheduled tour dates lined up. But the release of this single bodes well for more splendor from Yellen on the horizon. While we wait, give “Me, Liquor and God” a spin or two and brush up on Night Beds’ body of work to date. Setting expectations to high is acceptable, because great things from this act are indisputably imminent.

Photo: Jarrod Renaud

Liz Rowley

Liz Rowley

Born in Mexico and raised in Toronto, Jerusalem and Chicago by a pair of journalists, Liz comes to BestNewBands.com with an inherited love of writing. After discovering a niche for herself in music journalism and radio while at Bates College in Maine, she always keeps a running playlist of new music to soundtrack her place in the world. Liz is passionate about helping dedicated, talented musicians gain the exposure they deserve. A recent transplant to Brooklyn from Hawaii, she is plagued by an incurable case of wanderlust and cursed with an affinity for old maps and old things like typewriters and vintage books. She adores photography and running and is very good with plants. Having come of age in Chicago, Wilco speaks to her soul. If she could be anything, she would be a cat in a Murakami novel.
Liz Rowley