Fire Track: Anna McClellan – “Drank Earlier”

Fire Track · Exploding in Sound Records

Anna McClellan’s “Drank Earlier” Is Painfully, Beautifully Honest

The Omaha-bred songwriter announces her new EP South of Dodge, out November 20 via Exploding in Sound, with a first single that doesn’t flinch.

There is a particular kind of song that knows exactly what it is doing and does it anyway. “Drank Earlier” is that kind of song. Carried by keys, guitars, horns, and Anna McClellan’s voice threading through all of it, the first single from her forthcoming EP South of Dodge maps the familiar loop of heartbreak and bad remedies with the kind of clarity that only arrives after the fact. It’s warm and a little woozy, and it earns both qualities.

South of Dodge began as a set of songs McClellan wrote in Omaha before her 2023 move, recorded live at ARC Studios with engineer Adam Roberts before she knew what they would become. Years later, settled in New York, she and Roberts finished them. The title refers to Dodge Street, the artery that cuts east-west through Omaha and serves as a useful coordinate for everything she came from. The songs were made by someone still trying to understand herself through romance, desire, and the particular pull of a place that shaped her. Listening back now, she can hear the person she was reaching toward.

McClellan wrote “Drank Earlier” in 2023 and stopped drinking in January of this year. The song predates that clarity by a few years, which is part of what makes it so affecting. It is not a song about recovery; it is a song about being inside the cycle, naming it, and not yet being ready to leave. That’s a harder and more honest thing to write, and she does it without self-pity or performance. Exploding in Sound, a label that has long counted McClellan among the best songwriters of her generation, calls this release something of a dream come true. After hearing “Drank Earlier,” it’s easy to understand why.

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