Communist Daughter has quite a back story.

“Sometimes life gets complicated,” says the band’s Johnny Solomon, formerly of Friends Like These. “I used to play in a band in the Twin Cities for a while in the 2000s, but my life kind of went off the deep end with personal disasters and drugs and jail. I was a wreck and I thought giving up on music and moving to a small town to start over would change all that but it just followed me there. Despite all of that I started writing songs again for some reason, mostly overnight or in binges, or I would entertain the idea of having some of my friends down to play through some demos.”

He goes on, “I met Molly [Moore] in that small town and she sang on some of the recordings, and we got to be pretty close, she said she couldn't see herself with me cause I was a drug addict. So I swore to get sober, and things just started to roll.”

Now their band, Communist Daughter, is about to release their second record, Lions & Lambs. And while that won’t be out until July 10, we’ve got the premiere of the Mike Mineheart-directed video for the album’s first single, “Speed of Sound,” right here.

“I get a little wary of being too open about what the songs address because my natural urge is to want to show you everything and I don't know if that's good for people,” says Solomon. “That being said, [this song] is about growing up and what that means. It’s about second guessing your choices, it’s about how everything that has a good also has a bad to it and about piling both of those up. When you go in one direction, you lose the chance of going in the other direction. It’s about how music changes as you get older cause it stops being a promise of what’s to come and starts being a reminder of what was.”

"Speed of Sound" - Communist Daughter, Lions & Lambs E.P. Grain Belt Records 2012 from Communist Daughter on Vimeo.