After a year of dropping singles under the Dominique and the Diamonds moniker, Dominique Gomez is gearing up to release her debut album, Honky Tonk Queen, this summer. The collection of 10 songs does plenty to subvert the American country-rock tradition not by retuning the basic formula—there’s plenty of lyrical longing and guitar twang to match it here—but merely by invading a space long occupied by heterosexual romance and nationalist agendas as a queer woman who’s proud of her Colombian heritage.
With several of the album’s tracks already out, today she returns with the collection’s closer “I Don’t Mind”—an origin story of sorts for the band that calmly looks back on a soured past relationship that ultimately relocated her from a coastal town outside of San Francisco to Los Angeles, where her career with the Diamonds has taken off. While she notes that she was heartbroken upon realizing that she’d never be able to comfortably return to that town, “I Don’t Mind” makes it fully transparent that she’s found a sense of peace with her new life in the city, the single’s gentle acoustic guitar strums echoing the ease with which she proclaims that she’s “right where [she’s] supposed to be” in the chorus.
“I wanted this song to sound like the moments I’d had in that coastal town, where the sea touches the redwoods of Muir Woods,” she shares. “A lot of time has passed since my move. ‘I Don't Mind’ is really about coming to terms with that chapter of my life being closed. If I wasn’t forced to leave, I would have never moved to LA and started Dominique and the Diamonds. I’m so incredibly happy with my life here and can now understand why that path wasn’t meant for me. In the end, I don’t mind that my ex took my old dream away from me. I wouldn’t trade this new chapter of my life for anything.”
Check out the fitting conclusion to the record below, and pre-order Honky Tonk Queen ahead of its arrival on June 26 here.
