Nightly is giving us more songs to rock out to thanks to their sophomore album wear your heart out.
The Nashville-based alternative pop band dropped 14 new tracks on their latest full-length project last month (August 25), which band member Jonny Capeci tells Celeb Secrets shows them becoming a more refined, diluted version of themselves as a band.
“I think the story that we’re trying to tell is just becoming a more refined, distilled version of ourselves as a band and defining our sound,” Jonny reveals to us in a virtual interview. “As we go on, I think we’re kind of stripping, even though this is a big album with a lot of energy to it. There’s not a ton of extra production that a lot of maybe our previous songs had. Its a lot of just playing of fewer instruments and finding better parts that we love; so I think that that is definitely something that’s more unique about this body of work than stuff that we’ve done in the past.”
Taking listeners on a rich, breezy and ethereal sonic experience that’s paired with emotionally candid lyrics, fans may recognize songs like “wear your heart out” along with their previously released single “like i do,” which the band shared a fun video that featured three adorable puppies from Nashville’s Wags and Walks.
But before they filmed the clip, Nick says the genesis of the song came from a riff John saw of Coldplay performing different versions of a riff on TikTok.
“‘like i do’ was written when we had a good chunk of the album done. When we wrote this, John came in with an idea from a video he had seen of Coldplay performing on Fallon or something. They did a version of clocks where like every section of the song, it was playing that riff, but one was of somebody singing it, one was strings playing it, one was a guitar playing it,” Nick explains. “So we had the idea of just having a song that was evolving and taking different shapes as well as using different instruments. I started playing that intro lead part on the piano, and that is kind of like the through idea for the whole song. And throughout the song, Joe starts playing that part on guitar and then somebody starts playing it on strings and different things. It ended up just being a really cool song and one of our favorites.
Wanting to do something special for the “like i do” music video, Jonny, Joey and Nick used their music video budget to give the pups an ultimate doggy dream day. The guys chose Sol, Sable and Harlow for their “playdate,” where they were spoiled with yummy treats, ran around open fields and looked out car windows.
“Our manager has rescued dogs before from this company in Nashville called Wags and Walks, and she had a good experience with them. She had this idea to give the money from the music video to donate it to their shelter, and then sort of this idea just formed where we were like, oh, we can take dogs out on little dog date,” Jonny explains. “We just feel really lucky that our fans have given us enough of a platform to be able to do stuff like that and hopefully give back a little bit.”
Sol, Sable and Harlow were the three dogs that were in the shelter the longest, and thankfully have all been adopted since filming. Jonny wound up even adopting Harlow — who is now named Harley — and he’s loving being a dog dad.
“Oh, it’s great,” he said with a smile. “She’s very sweet. She’s a really well behaved dog.”
And while these songs have so much meaning to them, the guys say that if they had to choose their favorites at the moment, they’d pick tracks like “my boys,” “dry eyes,” “like i do,” “the feeling” and “shirt.”
Created with the live show in mind, Nightly will take wear your heart out on the road with their massive Wear Your Heart Out Tour in North America this fall. Kicking off October 5th in Austin, Texas, the guys will hit major markets like Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Boston, New York and Philadelphia before wrapping up in their hometown of Nashville, Tennessee on November 16.
“We’re the most excited for this tour because the album was really written to be played live. I think the tour will be very rewarding because we have all of that work we’ve done on the album come to fruition, you know, and be able to hear the songs being sung back by fans and just like, enjoy that moment with them. I think it’s really when the album is gonna come to life,” Jonny shares.
“We also never put out a body of work and pour it like this soon after. Our first album was in COVID, so we didn’t play those songs live for a year and a half, two years almost. So this is like the first time that we’re releasing a body of work and then going on tour a month later. I think it’s gonna be really awesome to play songs that are so fresh and so new to us and our fans at the same time, which I feel like will be a unique experience that we haven’t experienced yet.”
For more on Nightly’s music, watch our full interview below and don’t forget to let us know which song off wear your heart out is your favorite by either leaving a reaction at the bottom of the post or by sliding into our DMs on Instagram at @celebsecrets.
You can connect with the band on Instagram by giving them a follow at @nightly.
LISTEN TO “wear your heart out” HERE: