Clover County Previews Debut Album With 'Virginia Slim'
(MPG) Georgia-based singer/songwriter Clover County announces that her debut LP Finer Things will release on September 26 via her own label Undercover Lover Records in partnership with Thirty Tigers. Produced by Carrie K (Noah Kahan, Maggie Antone, Koe Wetzel), the album is a coming-of-age soundtrack that explores romantic, familial and platonic love with a winking charm and an observing eye.
To accompany the announcement, Clover released the project's bittersweet first single "Virginia Slim." Unfolding like the green rolling hills of Georgia's Blood Mountain where she was inspired to write the song, "Virginia Slim" uses a fuzzy guitar, a painfully beautiful fiddle and the flick of a Zippo lighter to tell the quintessential 'right person, wrong time' story.
Next month, Clover will hit the road with rising country star Sam Barber for a run which includes dates in Toronto, Raleigh and more. She will also play FloydFest later this month and Austin City Limits in October.
"'Virginia Slim' is about falling for the idea of someone more than the actual person," Clover shares. "After months on the road and too many blurred connections, I was burnt out. This song became a way to be honest with myself: about craving comfort, about romanticizing what's in front of me and about choosing to protect a friendship instead of rushing into something I wasn't ready for. Brad Cook helped me write the last few lines, including the most important of the whole song - 'It's been a long time since I've known love that wasn't war.' My two favorite instruments on this song are the Zippo lighter and the fiddle."
Living comfortably in the space between folk, Americana and alternative, Clover affectionately refers to the genre she occupies as "bootgaze." Equally inspired by the classic country of Dolly Parton and the '90s rock of Sheryl Crow as she is by her contemporaries like Waxahatchee and Hovvdy, she blends the twang of timeless country songwriting with tongue-in-cheek observations on modern love. While her humor, levity and youth come across in the LP, she also took her experience of girlhood seriously, aiming to make this record to honor the little girl she used to be.
She knew off the bat that she found a dream partner in producer Carrie K, who helped her "protect the femininity of these songs" and became a friend while she stayed in Nashville and recorded at Carrie's home studio. Elsewhere, the two brought on engineer Maddie Harmon (Megan Maroney, Kesha), co-writer Will Taylor of Hovvdy and players like Noah Levine and Hank Compton to contribute across the record.
On the album, Clover shares: "Finer Things is the shoebox I keep under my bed full of old love letters and trinkets I can't quite let go of. It's polaroids, bottle caps and plane tickets. It's a memorial for all the ways I've loved and been loved. These songs began when I was 18 - scrawled in notebooks, half-sung into voice memos, carried with me through the years. I started recording them at 23, and at 24, they'll start to find their place in the world. Unintentionally, they trace a timeline: from naive to knowing. Finer Things is about all the ways I've shown up in love and how it's shown up for me, the fleeting and the forever. Romantic, familial, platonic. The sweetness, the sting and the spaces in between."
As a student at University of Georgia, Clover cut her teeth playing house shows and college bars around Athens, GA. After the release of her debut single in 2023, she continued to hone her sound on the road with alt darlings and country stars like Lord Huron, Medium Build, Shakey Graves, Waylon Wyatt and Morgan Wade. Then, last year she released her debut EP Porch Lights which included the nostalgic single "Ultraviolet," which peaked at #22 on MediaBase Triple A charts and is still a mainstay on SiriusXM. Now, on her debut LP, she sings about those years where she often found herself blissfully naive with a newfound wisdom of someone who's grown up but knows she's not done growing.
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