With their highly-anticipated new album CONCERNS OF WASP AND WILLOW announced and on its way this March, Bay Area indie pop heroes THE CORNER LAUGHERS offer up another preview single from the record: “Dusking,” a sweet idyll of a tune reflecting the shades of both vibrant colors and melancholic shades of grey on display throughout the band's new collection. The single is out March 6 and up for pre-order/presave now:

https://orcd.co/cornerlaughers-dusking

“Dusking,” like all the tracks on CONCERNS including the recent indie hit “Rainbow Cardigan,” was crafted by THE CORNER LAUGHERS' long-running and quintessential lineup of Karla Kane (vocals, ukulele), Khoi Huynh (bass, vocals and more), KC Bowman (guitar, vocals and more) and Charlie Crabtree (drums). Across the record, they weave a tapestry with threads of joy and sadness intertwining within each song, and the twilight setting mirrors that ambition so perfectly that “Dusking” is one of a trilogy of tunes embedded in the album set during the in-between hours (the others being the warmly eerie “Harvestman” and the album-closing “Larkspur Landing”). The single highlights both the band's connection to their native Northern California and the ecological concerns that dot the album, but it's primarily about capturing the joy of living in the moment, as Kane explains:

“It's a little slice of life – of an evening scene, walking through San Francisco, awaiting public transportation and taking a Caltrain journey down the Peninsula, watching and pondering the world going by in the fading light outside the windows. More literal and linear (maybe because it follows a path and then a train track!) than usual for me. It was a song started in situ, stream of consciousness – I really just started singing the opening lines as they unfolded in real time.” She adds that a subtle message underlies the whimsy of the lyrics: “We’re big public transportation advocates and it’s not easy sometimes to get around that way. The Bay Area is also an incredibly expensive place to live, which makes things difficult for artists. There’s always a sort of wistful romance in train journeys and songs about trains.”

Musically, the song is a sterling example of the organic chemistry the band has developed over the years, but it also retains an inviting pulse that calls back to its early origins, as Huynh explains. “Karla handed me a vocal-only demo of the song and asked me to add some instrumentation. To emphasize the train theme, I thought it should have a hypnotic rhythm track. I took inspiration from the music of my younger years, specifically the 1986 Pretty In Pink soundtrack. Some elements from my over-the-top '80s synth demo can be heard on the final recording, but Charlie’s precision drumming and KC’s sunset-over-the-Pacific-Ocean surf guitar really took it into another realm.” It's exactly that sweet collision of modern, retro, and even ancient textures, both musically and lyrically, that have led to THE CORNER LAUGHERS so frequently being referred to as “timeless,” and that's never been so vibrantly evident as it is on CONCERNS AND WASP AND WILLOW. “Dusking” sets the scene for the album's release on March 27, when fans old and new will be able to explore the new world the band has created in all its rich, heartfelt detail.