Video Premiere: Mary Bue, “Right Now”
The Minnesota singer-songwriter and force of nature has a propulsive new single out today. Get an exclusive first look at the accompanying music video here!
Mary Bue. Photo credit: Ilia Stockert.
The deeper you dig into the experiences and music of Mary Bue, the more you realize the fullness with which she’s determined to live her life. Equally at home on the stages of the Twin Cities and beyond as she is leading yoga retreats in remote international locations, her voice and stage presence are similarly attuned to whatever music style she’s drawn to, and it’s a wide range—from aching piano ballads to brash guitar-driven indie rock.
Mary will release her ninth album, The Wildness of Living and Dying, in February 2025. The album was composed in the years following a very specific incident—an act of kindness rewarded by a violent carjacking—but Bue takes her personal experiences of trauma, resilience, healing and growth and expands her lens to the universal circle of life and death, destruction and transformation.
The first single from the new album, “Right Now,” comes out today, Sept. 26, and Bue is celebrating it with a show at Icehouse tonight with opener Superior Siren. She’s also preparing to release an accompanying music video. We’re honored to share an exclusive premiere of the “Right Now” video today!
Mary Bue's The Wildness of Living and Dying album artwork. Photo by Ilia Stockert.
The spiritual and the physical are inextricably intertwined for Bue, and it comes through in the lyrics of “Right Now,” as she paints a vivid picture of the things that are all happening at once on (and to) our planet, what people are feeling as they go through the best and worst times of their lives, and the parallels between humanity and nature: “Right now a woman sits leaden with grief / Right now the sunflowers droop heavy-headed.”
Images of ecstasy and tragedy, life and death in an endless loop, pile up with increasingly frenetic energy, until Bue sings “Right now the forest, it beckons your silence.” While the music continues to build, the lyrics shift into a mantra that Bue repeats over and over, screaming it with intense abandon by the end of the song: “Stand alone amongst the tall pines.”
“I have a very active, wild mind, and probably am teaching what I most need to learn,” Bue says. “I’ve always been fascinated with the thought that everything under the sun is happening RIGHT NOW, which is overstimulating and potentially overwhelming. That we are but drops of water in the vast sea … How the silence of the forest is an escape from the hustle, and yet everything happens there, too. This song reflects on the cycles of life, death and transformation, as well as my recently diagnosed ADHD.”
The video for “Right Now,” directed by Jonny Herchert, expresses this by accompanying Bue through city streets, forests and trails. The constant motion of a single person in various landscapes is the visual focal point while the lyrics paint pictures of what’s going on everywhere else.
“Jonny thought it’d be interesting to take a run with me around beautiful places in Minnesota—Minneapolis, the dry bed of Minnehaha Creek (which I mention in the song), Duluth, Lutsen—and get a glimpse into my mind while I run. My mind truly is like this fast-rush of imagery. He said he ‘got his workout in’!”
Watch “Right Now”!
Tonight’s single release show at Icehouse features almost the entire band from the record: producer and bassist Steve Price, Jeremy Ylvisaker, Richard Medek, and Julia Floberg. The ethereal, atmospheric Duluth folk act Superior Siren opens.
Show details:
Thursday, September 26th
Icehouse, 2528 Nicollet Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55404
Doors 6:30pm / Music 8pm
$15 (+fees) advance / $20 at the door
“Right Now” Video and Single Credits
Video Directed by Jon Herchert - Deck Night Productions
Single Produced by Steve Price, co-produced by Mary Bue ~ featuring Jeremy Ylvisaker, Richard Medek, Shannon Frid-Rubin, Julia Floberg.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is the primary writer, social media manager, podcast producer and event-calendar updater for Adventures in Americana. By day she’s a marketing writer/brand strategist. In addition to playing guitar and songwriting, she writes self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley.
