On their new single, “She Drives Me,” The Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs step away from music wrapped in commercial polish and instead embrace something more real. The result is a warm, winding up-tempo jam through the countryside that’s musically lush and infectious fun to boot.
With roots in progressive folk and legs filled with jam-styled energy, “She Drives Me” is a return to form. The track from band members Zack and Kendra Harding results from years of built-up musical aspirations. They had danced around many genres they loved early in their career to go for a more “marketable” sound. But this track is a confident about-face. It celebrates their influences, fuses their roots, and values passion over pretension.
The source of inspiration behind the song is as cheeky as the groove. This tongue-in-cheek story about the woman of your dreams being too good and maybe even too wild to be true is written by Zack Harding. A tip of the hat to the unhinged genius of Goose Creek Symphony, he excavated the track from the vaults, aired it in his shows, and finally took it into the studio in late 2024. But it’s since evolved into a layered, jammy tribute to Zack’s prog-rock roots, straying from that acoustic folk-rock inspiration.
Behind him are Kendra Harding, from whom he borrows vocals to add texture and harmony to the song, and Wayne Redden, who helps ground the rhythm with a head-nodding drive. Thanks to that midtempo swing, which is approximated, you might lean into this one and get lost, not just while pretending you’re in a car with the windows down and a country road unspooling.
Its sheer sprawl distinguishes “She Drives Me” in the soundbite-driven present. It takes its time, stretches, and breathes. Doing so provides something all too rare in a jam that doesn’t demand your attention but wins it. For fans of the jam scene or progressive folk performers like Billy Strings, The Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs’ “She Drives Me“ is a groove-forward, feel-good reminder that sometimes, in letting go of the rules, magic happens for real.
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