No matter how good your relationships are with people around you, you will eventually hit some rough waters. When that moment arise, often when least expected, you will battle your own feelings, your memories, your own intellectual analytical powers and finally your own will, and you will have to face the question: “should I stay or should I go.”
The complex nuances of the mundane and the celebrations, the joy’s and the sorrows, the pleasures and the pains in this life are all mixed up, and what outweighs the other is sometimes hard to tell. This is the internal conversation that happens when you realize you are deep in a moment of uncertainty. Somehow I think for many it happens in the car…at least it does for me.
“CROWS ON THE WIRE” is off my album “Pains & Pleasures of Intimacy”. This album is dark and roots oriented, where the rock, blues and country influences are audible. This song was released as a single and was paired with “Dead man in the Closet”, a song that creates the other side of the coin, flipped in the air under the moonlight somewhere deep in US suburbia.
You don’t know where the coin is going to land or if you will ever see it again, but with these two songs blaring out through your soundsystem the mood is set: a slow, waltzy churn towards something unsettling.
I call this music Suburban Noir, a kind of confessional country blues. Living in a suburban area in New Jersey at the time of making this record, I felt at home in a space between the beautiful every day life and the ongoing strangeness of just being alive and the relationships we are creating.
In many ways this song can be seen as a murder ballad. But murder of who? Yourself? Your inner life/ spirit? We see the three characters shifting seats in the car throughout the video, as we shift inside ourselves, going through the day, going through our lives, always at the border of giving life, taking life, murder.
Two other things I really enjoy when it comes to how Johan has executed this particular video. The rain drops on the car is filmed so it looks like the branches are reaching out for the car. It’s ever so subtle, but it’s there. It symbols to me all the things that are reaching out for us on this journey. In this particular setting, there is something omenus about it.
The second thing is how the car represents our immidiate space in this universe that we are traveling through. Our body, our house, the village or city we have chosen to live in. At 3:39 in the video, the screen suddently opens up. The feeling is expanded, a wider view and a different perspective is now reached.
Two bodies lie by the roadside, a third drives off. It seems like the evil character won this round and managed to kill the two others, the two seeking love, seeking a relationship, seeking a new life away from what was. However, in their pusrsuit to get away, they were caught up with whatever unsettled demonic forces present from the beginning.
And yet, it’s not the end. And so we move on to the final chapter in this story. Alabaster Jar.
Tell me what you thought about this video. I would very much like to hear it.
All of these four videos are from my previous album “Pains and Pleasures of Intimacy”.
You can listen to it here:
Or come to spotify and put it on your playlist: