On June 24, 2024, Ramona Clay released their debut single "Lost in You." The band consists of Katerina Jae on vocals, piano and guitar; Tim Jenkins on guitar; Cody Calhoun on guitar; Joseph Leppert on bass guitar; Kevin Stiles on trombone and guitar; and Matthew Heinrich on drums.
Ramona Clay started as a band in 2022:
Katerina Jae says: "When my project Interstate Run was on a break, I wrote a ton of music in the corner of my bedroom using Logic Pro, an audio interface, my piano, and a microphone. I had two albums worth of music that didn't really fit the brand of Interstate Run, but I wanted to do something with it. I started talking to Tim Jenkins about wanting to start an indie rock collective, and he ended up joining me. We found bandmates and played our first show at the old location of Vivo Live Events in Overland Park on November 13, 2022."
I recently saw Ramona Clay play at Vivo's new location in Leavenworth, Kansas.
The band name shares the Pink Floyd joke from "Have a Cigar" of "Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?":
"Commonly misunderstood, no one in Ramona Clay is actually named Ramona. As Too Much Rock described in their interview in 2023: "'Ramona Clay isn't a person, but rather one of the many musical outlets for Katerina "'Kat'" Jae. Jae is a tireless promoter of both her music and her causes, and Ramona Clay combines those passions, layering moody rock on top of direct calls to destigmatize conversations around mental health. It's curious for a band to have such an outward mission statement, but Jae is fearless.'" The indie rock band gets its name from the gerne of books called roman à clef (pronounced rō män ä ˈklā) which disguises real events or people as fictional. Using the collective’s name as a play on words, the band name disguised the roman à clef genre as a woman’s name, Ramona Clay."
Jae states that both her parents influenced her musical tastes growing up - including the Temptations, the Supremes, Patsy Cline, Elton John, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Queen.
"At one point," Jae says, "I decided I wanted to branch out and find my own music to love. I started loving rock music which led me on a journey to find bands like No Doubt, The Cranberries, Third Eye Blind, Joywave, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nirvana, Garbage, Metallica, Something Corporate, Yellowcard, Young the Giant, Portishead, and Mazzy Star. In addition to popular music, a lot of my musical influence also came from the classical training I recieved in marching and symphonic bands from the age of 10 up until my early 20s."
The band's debut single "Lost in You" certainly reflects the '80s influence. It echoes back the passion and desperation from songs like Bonnie Taylor's "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
Katerina Jae says that the song came about with part of an influence of James Bond:
"A couple years ago, I wanted to write a James Bond type song because I wanted to write something different than what I usually wrote. I wanted to lean into my contralto vocals and build a song that could be expanded to include a chamber orchestra or symphony if I ever got the chance to do so.
"Even though we already had our entire concept album The Things We Don't Talk About already written, and this song really didn't fit with the concept album, we went ahead and recorded it at Catamount Recording when we started recording our album in January 2023.
"Even though "Lost in You" is not necessarily the best representation of the music we do overall, we chose to release it first because we didn't want to have to wait until after releasing the album and all the singles off of it before we could release this single. This also gave us the opportunity to open up our Spotify page for Ramona Clay and give people something to listen to from us until our album releases in October of this year."
Listen to "Lost in You" here: https://open.spotify.com/album/3kXC1EDbe7cnjckZ8xBTzF?si=VYnotaTqSBmHB8y_cEOonQ
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