See Sarah Shook and the Disarmers’ Video for ‘The Bottle Never Lets Me Down’
Sarah Shook and the Disarmers’ latest album Years stands as one of the best country releases of 2018, a distinction earned in part by the standout track “The Bottle Never Lets Me Down.” Shook and her band have released a new video for the song, directed by Gorman Bechard, that captures the group onstage.
“Every day you tell me I’m a drunkard / Every night you lie awake and stew,” Shook sneers, before delivering the first verse’s biting payoff line: “I never claimed to be anything other / cause the bottle never lets me down the way you do.” The song is delivered from the perspective of a man, with the title nodding to Merle Haggard’s 1966 hit “The Bottle Let Me Down.”
“This is the breakup album I wrote before breaking up with the person that a lot of these songs are either about or they’re from their perspective,” Shook tells Rolling Stone Country. “I ended a four-year-long, very unhealthy, very emotionally and verbally abusive relationship. The exhaustion and the tiredness that figures into that is not so much a physical exhaustion as just being emotionally drained and tired of defending myself against ridiculous accusations of paranoia.”
Shook and the Disarmers, based out of North Carolina, are currently on an overseas tour. They’ll return to the States in late June, beginning with a show in Nashville, and tour through September. See the tour dates here.