NATE BARNES - Something Else Tonight - Quartz Hill Records

With his breakout single “You Ain’t Pretty” laying the solid foundation, Nate Barnes has since proven his know how around a romantic lyric with songs such as “Girl Like You,” “Make A Wildflower Grow,” and his recent, summertime feel-good, “Love in the Country.”

He now gives us our second look at his full-length debut album (due in 2025) with his newest release, “Something Else Tonight.”

Written by Jason Sellers, Easton Corbin, and Marv Green, the simplicity of the rhythmic mid-tempo glide allows Barnes to place his smiled drawl atop the picturesque lyric as he trails a snapshot of the heart swooned feels of the motion picture inspired romance he’s found in real life.

“Growing up in small-town Michigan, I saw a lot of films at our local movie theater, and ‘Something Else Tonight’ is about falling in love and suddenly feeling like you’re in one of those movies,” says Barnes. “It’s a song that just makes you feel good, whether you’re already in love or you’d like to be.”

Like flipping through a date night photo album of when he first started to feel his heart beating faster as he allowed it to fall, he paints the scene throughout the opening verse while touching on the memory making feels that captivated the security and intrigue of the never want this night to end emotion.

“I swear we talked about everything , like I’ve known you and you’ve known me all my life,” he sings in the opening verse, while using then the second to place a comfort into the exhilaration of not knowing where it will all may lead but knowing they’re absolutely onto something good and he’d regret not finding out. 

The aspects of falling in love are an often-difficult emotion to try and explain. You feel differently than you have when you thought you caught it in the past, your heart beats a little bit faster than it ever has, and in the case of this song, that “something else” feeling can only be described as something like a timeless romantic film.

“That moons got something on it

Feels like a movie don’t it

Ain’t just those diamonds in the sky

It’s something else tonight

First sight and falling baby

Ain’t sounding quite as crazy 

Lord knows I’ve never been that guy

But it’s something else tonight, tonight, tonight

It’s something else tonight, tonight, tonight”

Having already shown his abilities around a love song, Barnes has crafted signature characteristics of what to expect from him. However, by carefully choosing a song like this that constructs an age-old feeling into something fresh and uniquely different, he elevates his connection factor with the in-love listener while building another layer of anticipation for things still to come. 

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)