Shannon Clark & The Sugar come to terms with love gone sour in their new single Thousand Times — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
The latest preview of the Ohio family band’s upcoming debut album Marks On The Wall, the gorgeously haunting number gracefully walks a line between Americana and soul, blending ringing blues guitar, shimmering organ and thumping tom-toms with understated electronics — all in service of bittersweet, soul-searching lyrics that lead into a chorus built from perfectly balanced layers of rich vocals.
“I wrote this song for all the people who have ever felt like they couldn’t move on,” says Clark. “It has an upbeat but a somber and strong message of a failed marriage/relationship … (It) feels like a distant cousin to a Gary Clark Jr. song.”
The family connections between Shannon Clark & The Sugar run much closer and deeper. Hailing from Darke County, Ohio — also the home of the American sharpshooter Annie Oakley — the band were formed by husband and wife Shannon and Brittany Clark, who joined the Warped Tour to represent Ohio in the mid-2000s. Soon after, tragedy hit the family with the loss of their second daughter. For a time the music stopped.
Ultimately, their songwriting would become the healing tool that brought them together and revived the band. When their oldest daughter Navie joined in 2019 as a vocalist/instrumentalist, they began experimenting with a new sound and Shannon Clark & The Sugar was born. Weaving together heartfelt emotions with a distinctive flair to create a sound that can only be described as Midwest Americana Soul, the trio write and perform original songs of loss, struggle and the human condition.
In 2020, the group’s single Carry Me was in contention for Best Music Video in multiple film festivals across the globe. They just finished their first full-length album Marks On The Wall, working with Grammy-winning producer Mark Howard (Bob Dylan, U2, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson). The album is slated for release on May 21.
Listen to Thousand Times above, hear more from Shannon Clark & The Sugar below, and keep up with them on their website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
