The Harmaleighs – Dancing In The Dark

21st September 2023 · 2010s, 2018, Music

This is very far from being my favourite Springsteen song; I don’t have much time for that Eighties period at all. But Nashville duo The Harmaleighs breathe new life into it.

They do it by turning it into a melancholy country song – much in the same way Last Town Chorus did with one of my least-favourite Bowie songs.

Haley Grant (lead vocals and guitar) and Kaylee Jasperson (bass and harmonies) released their version in 2018, so I’m guessing they weren’t even born when Bruce brought his version out in 1984 with that​ video featuring a pre-Friends Courtney Cox.

I have to confess I haven’t heard of The Harmaleighs til now so I don’t know a darned thing about them, except what I’ve read: namely that they met in college and in 2015 they released their debut album, entitled Pretty Picture, Dirty Bush.

Encouraged by its release, they moved out of their apartment – they were a couple – and away from Philadelphia, buying a van and set off for a life of music on the road with their baby pug Gus.

Now settled in Nashville, they have made at least two more albums, the second of which – She Won’t Make Sense – was a conceptual affair centring on Haley’s challenges and triumphs with mental health, which worsened when the couple broke up after six years but continued to work together.