I'm Sorry, Therese – New Single by Clay Oak Coming September 1

On September 1, Clay Oak will release I’m Sorry, Therese, a deeply personal song based on a real experience from the early 1990s.

I was seventeen or eighteen. It must have been sometime in 1991 or 1992. Therese was my very first girlfriend.

At that age, having someone choose you can mean more than you fully understand at the time. I was terrified of losing her. And yet, despite that fear, I managed to make a serious mistake.

The strange thing is that I knew I had done something wrong long before the relationship ended. I knew there was something I should probably tell her. But I didn’t know what the right thing to do was. Tell her and risk losing her immediately, or keep quiet and hope things would somehow work out.

I chose to stay quiet.

More than thirty years later, I still don’t know whether telling her would have been the right choice. Maybe it would have ended the relationship immediately. Maybe keeping quiet made things worse. Maybe there was no good choice left by that point.

I also don’t know for certain if that was the reason Therese ended the relationship so quickly. I can only tell the story from my side, from what I remember and from what I have thought about over the years.

And this isn’t a story about me looking for sympathy. I know I was the bad guy in this particular story.

Sometimes I still think about Therese, not because I naively imagine that we would somehow have stayed together and lived happily ever after. Life doesn’t work that way. I think about her because I wonder if I was one of her first real experiences of love and relationships too. If she ever found out what had happened, I can only imagine how deeply that might have hurt her.

I know how I would have felt if the roles had been reversed.

That is where I’m Sorry, Therese comes from.

The song is the first single from a forthcoming Clay Oak album that will continue exploring personal experiences and relationships. The album isn’t finished yet — I haven’t even finished writing the next song — so there is no release date for it at this point. But I’m Sorry, Therese is the beginning of that story.

The song was created using Suno as an AI music production tool. I then did rough editing and adjustments in Audacity before the final master was created using Mixea. The technology is part of the production process, but the story, lyrics and experiences behind the song are mine.

I’m Sorry, Therese will be released on September 1, 2026.

And if, by some strange coincidence, Therese ever hears it:

I’m sorry.