We Speak Music

Son Stone Releases Heartfelt New Single “Don’t Take Me Back, Carleen” on May 14

Published

2 months ago

May 9, 2025

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Son Stone (Ben Diamond) is set to release his latest single, “Don’t Take Me Back, Carleen,” on May 14, delivering a compelling blend of heartbreak, humor, and honesty. Produced by three-time GRAMMY winner Justin Guip at Milan Hill Studio near Woodstock, NY, the track showcases Stone’s signature lyrical wit and emotional depth.

Despite its romantic-sounding title, “Don’t Take Me Back, Carleen” isn’t about a former lover—Carleen is actually a former co-worker whose name just fit the song’s soul. “She’s super sweet,” Stone says, “and I’ve always loved her name.”

The song tells a richly textured story of love, regret, and self-awareness. It’s a reverse love song—a vulnerable plea to not rekindle an old flame. The track explores “the struggle between desire and practicality,” capturing a moment of clarity in the emotional chaos that follows heartbreak.

Recorded over three intense 12-hour days in a converted barn on a hill in Milan, NY, the track was shaped by the creative energy of producer Justin Guip—best known for his work with Hot Tuna and Levon Helm. Guip’s hands-on approach brought the best out of the Son Stone Project’s musicians, with unforgettable moments like yelling, “YOU DON’T GET TO SOUND LIKE NEIL YOUNG UNLESS YOU’RE AT 10!” to guitarist Ross, and coaching Ben with gentle encouragement.

“Justin brought magic to the sessions,” Stone recalls. “His ideas pushed us beyond our comfort zones, and his ear for tone was phenomenal. It felt more like a spiritual retreat than a recording session.”

With a musical style often compared to John Prine and Tom Waits, Son Stone has written over 200 songs spanning folk, rock, blues, pop, and Hawaiian slack key. His performances have earned acclaim from American Songwriter magazine and stages like The Bitter End (NYC), My Father’s Place, The Landmark Theater, and the upcoming Fiddle and Folk Festival in September 2025.

“Don’t Take Me Back, Carleen” follows the release of his long-anticipated ninth album this past March and offers fans a taste of his full-band rock album slated for June 2025.

Fans can stream “Don’t Take Me Back, Carleen” on all major platforms starting May 14,

We Speak Music

Mutual Shock’s Nervous Systems Showcases The Architecture of Alienation

Published

7 hours ago

June 23, 2025

Philomena Marie

Seattle’s ever-shifting musical landscape has long given rise to voices that thrive in the gray areas—between genres, between moods, between identities. Dan Powers, the artist behind Mutual Shock, adds a new entry into that canon with Nervous Systems, a debut album that operates as both sonic exorcism and sociocultural diagnosis. At its core, the record is a meditation on life under late capitalism—a terrain where dread, detachment, and digital blur are not just thematic textures, but everyday conditions.

Emerging from the shadowy emotional terrain explored on his 2024 EP Stimulus Progression, Powers takes his vision further here—not louder, but deeper. Nervous Systems doesn’t seek to overwhelm. Instead, it seeps in. It’s less an album you “hear” and more one you slowly inhabit, like a strange new architecture that reveals its structure room by room. The choice of analog synths and skeletal drum programming isn’t retro affectation; it’s a design choice rooted in feeling, in tension, in deliberate control.

Mutual Shock sits in conversation with a lineage of outsider electronic music—Drab Majesty’s theatrical alienation, Molchat Doma’s post-Soviet nostalgia, the mechanized introspection of Nine Inch Nails—but avoids being pinned down by any one aesthetic. Powers is less interested in genre homage than he is in emotional architecture. Each sound feels like a corridor leading somewhere disorienting yet familiar, like a half-remembered dream of an office building at night.

Thematically, the album is deeply of this moment. It’s about burnout, yes, but not in the way we meme it. It’s about the deeper erosion beneath the hustle: the spiritual confusion, the existential rootlessness, the constant digital hum that keeps us from ever fully arriving in our own lives. Powers channels these anxieties not with histrionics, but with careful understatement—letting the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. It’s as much sociology as it is art.

What makes Nervous Systems so vital is that it doesn’t offer escape. Instead, it offers recognition. In a time when much of culture aims to distract, Mutual Shock chooses to reflect. Powers holds a mirror to the disquiet and lets it speak—not with panic, but with precision. The result is an album that lingers long after the final note, not as a soundtrack to alienation, but as a language for it.