After years in various bands on their own, the husband/wife duo of Heather Larimer (Eux Autres) and Brian Naubert (Ruston Mire, The Service Providers) have come together under a new umbrella, Corvair, with early singles that have us anxious for the full-length debut, set to drop on Feb. 19 via Paper Walls.

We're honored to premiere the second single from the album, "Sailor Down," a driving track that allows the duo's extensive experience to make it all sound so easy. Sonic touchpoints can be found in Land of Talk or Deep Sea Diver, but the guitar work and vocal harmonies separate Corvair in their own lane.

The band detailed the new song for us:

"Sailor Down" is a he said/she said retelling of a new and fragile relationship that seems promising but terrifying. The lyrics were inspired by the town of Astoria, Oregon, which feels very gothic and haunted with the ghosts of sailors. The water there, where the Columbia River and the Pacific converge, is so treacherous that "bar pilots" have to help guide the big ships over the sandbars to safety—there have been over 2000 shipwrecks there. And Cape Disappointment, mentioned in the second line of the song, is a real place in Washington, right near where Lewis and Clark ended up stuck for a miserable winter in a little cove they named Dismal Nitch.

Since the song is about love, these dangerous waters seemed like good metaphor for the huge risk of heartbreak. Something interesting about how the song turned out is that it's not a parallel construction; the second part is completely different than the first part, and they're sung by two different voices, just like how two different people have alternate versions of the same story.

We've also got the two voices of acoustic and electric guitar in dialogue throughout the song. It's the only song on the record that uses a nylon string acoustic guitar as the driving instrument, which is a very unusual choice. We actually wrote the song at home in Portland on acoustic guitar, brought it to the drummer Eric Eagle in Seattle and recorded it at a secret old-school rock star’s studio, then brought the files back to Portland and built the whole song around that drum beat, during the COVID shutdown of last spring.

Then, right before mixing, we decided we wanted the drums to be more ballsy, more like Live at Budokan. So we decided to rip the spine out if you will. We sent the files back to the drummer, who re-tracked to the nearly-finished song, and sent it in digitally to our mixing session at the last minute. It was a comically messy process, but we love how it turned out.

We love it, too! Make sure to stay tuned for the self-titled debut coming soon, which you can pre-order on BandCamp or pre-save on Spotify here.

VISIT: Corvair