HUDSON VALLEY

                                                 "Too Soon"

                                                  Independent Release

Though they’ve already carved out an incredible path with high profile gigs and hot releases such as “Right Place Now” and their cover of Old Dominion’s “Shut Me Up,” when Hudson Valley delivered “Ain’t The Gun” earlier this year, they blasted our speakers with a fury that amped their edgy rock influences and smashed them into their modern country vibes, opening their next chapter with an exciting twist that elevated their sound to fresh, new heights.

The group now returns with their second new release of 2023, “Too Soon.”

The soft pace of the song provides perfect juxtaposition to what we heard on “Ain’t The Gun,” showcasing the depth of their songwriting prowess while allowing frontwoman Sarah Owens to utilize the emotional tilts of her voice to capture the draining feelings of being stuck in the middle of an affair.

Painting anxious pictures of their current night together quickly approaching its inevitable end, when the lyric arrives at the line, “lovers undercover, holding on to each other…running from real life,” we get our first glimpse of the guilty feelings that their short-lived pleasure causes in its aftermath.

Diving deeper into that specific feeling, Owens grips conflicting emotions as we hear on lines such as “stuck here in the middle between the pleasure and the pain” and “feeling right and doing wrong,” before we then see her maturely face the mirror to place blame on their own lustful shoulders when she admits that they both know it can’t go on like this, confusingly adding the guilty gut punch to the chorus:

“4AM knows all out secrets

The moon’s seen all our moods

We’ve made the bed we lie in

In this no tell motel room

The morning light will take us

To the ones we go home to

We want to stay here for forever

But the sun comes up too soon”

The fact that there’s never a true resolve to this affair really hits the nail on the head for a situation like this, capturing the hard truth that walking away from a lusting physical relationship that satisfies in the moment is no easy task even when it’s 100% wrong and you know you should.

So many of us, whether physically or mentally, struggle with these types of thoughts and emotions in our relationships as we allow the natural guilt and shame to engulf us, which allows Hudson Valley to then strike an instant connectibility factor with the listener who is struggling and fighting their own conflicting emotions.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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