Kate Teague Harbors a Broken Heart on New Single “I Feel Bad for My Dog”

Memphis, Tennessee, singer-songwriter Kate Teague has a new EP due out in under a month, and in the lead up to Loose Screw (Aug. 11, self-released), she shared its second single this week, the lovesick slow burn “I Feel Bad for My Dog.”

Building from nothing but moody keys and Teague’s emotive vocal, the song finds the singer not only bereft of a lover, but also unable to express the extent of her love, neither to her absent subject, nor to anyone around her. “I feel bad for my dog / He feels me tossing every hour at night / He probably wonders why I cry / Your name all through the night,” she sings, with understated percussion and oceanic guitar gradually coming into focus around her voice.

As her heartbreak blossoms, it’s met with melodic synths, which seem to factor more prominently into Loose Screw than they did Teague’s self-titled 2019 debut. “If you knew I was lonely at night / If you knew I was thinking about you / Would you still hold her tight, close your eyes and dream at night?” Teague implores in the bridge, where sporadic strings only further raise the song’s emotional stakes—we’re left with no choice but to join her in not knowing.

“I began writing this song at 4 am one morning. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up, sat at my computer, and started writing the synth line and lyrics. I finished it by the end of the day,” Teague recalled in a statement. “It is one of the first songs I’ve arranged on my own and the only song on the EP that came from that original project on Garageband.”

“I Feel Bad For My Dog” follows last month’s “Poison Mind.”

You can hear new music from Kate Teague, as well as local, regional, national and international artists on our music discovery station The Independent 89.9 HD4. And you can follow our Fresh Squeeze playlist on Spotify to stream all the best new music, updated every month.