Since their formation in Bellingham, Washington in 1999, Your Heart Breaks and front-person Clyde Petersen have been instrumental in both its indie scene and the overarching queer community. Featuring a myriad of queer voices and a reading list that Petersen has personally curated to go along with the album, the band's ninth full-length, Drone Butch Blues will be released on 19th April via SofaBurn. A concept album centered on the writings of LGBTQI authors spanning history, Your Heart Breaks explores an array of stories surrounding the queer community. These themes include but are not limited to forbidden love, historic events, the impact of AIDS, and rebellion interwoven with Petersen's own chronicle.
"Late Nights in the Lab" is Your Heart Breaks' latest single from off of Drone Butch Blues, featuring mellow, progressive instrumentation as Petersen tells an autobiographical tale of coming into the queer community in college. As they tell PopMatters, "Since I was in junior high, I had a video camera in my hands whenever I could get ahold of one. This music video uses footage I shot between 1998 and 2000, my college years spent becoming part of a queer community, figuring out who I was, learning about punk rock and studying film-making."
"I was looking for queer heroes and role models, and I had a huge crush on my college film professor who is a radical, out, queer femme lesbian. I needed role models like that to feel like I had a future in the world. Older queer people with similar interests who had survived discrimination and AIDS and who were not afraid to make their opinions heard. I feel like it is critical for queer teens to have role models like this to help them survive the teen years and early 20s when drugs and alcohol and suicide are huge risk factors. I was reflecting on that experience as I wrote this album and I asked a hero of mine, Wynne Greenwood, from Tracy and the Plastics, a famous '90s video riot grrrl/electroclash band, to sing on the song, as the teacher. She is a film teacher in real life and a queer femme woman, so I wanted the representation to be there in the story. I cast my intern Max Otero to play me as a younger person and Nicole Zeller to play the teacher. I collected a bunch of old video edit gear and set it up like a fake studio and filmed them on MiniDV to match the footage from college, and then I cut it all together."
