My Strong Suit

As much as I want to, I can’t manage to come up with a nice, succinct post to tell about this week’s song. It doesn’t exactly have one story. I suppose you could say it has a few themes. Stream of consciousness (much like this blog post, after a night of little sleep). Striking images. Bright color. And, lastly but most importantly, plainness and emptiness.

Here’s our song “My Strong Suit” and the video, which we’re both really proud of. What follows is my tired mind’s attempt at giving you the context of its birth.

So here are the little stories that make up that 4 minute one you just heard and watched. About the song: I was recently looking through scraps of paper, hoping for some lyrical gold that I’d somehow forgotten. Eran was working on this harmonic idea and I paired some old stream-of-consciousness ramblings with it, which was the beginning of this song’s lyrics. Eran was struck by the dichotomy of clear vivid images (blue ink, red pain, porcelain limbs) paired with all those dull and boring words (humdrum, ordinary, bland). After we filled out the rest of the song with simliar pairings, that strangeness took on new life in the video.

Each verse shows you some relatively normal, typical scene, but there is something a little strange, unusual about each one. We took each phrase and did our best, with somewhat limited resources, to evoke its strangeness and sharpness. Instead of working toward a story, we worked toward a few scenes, living paintings maybe, to give you colors, a mood, a feeling… and then depart. And let me just say, we had a great time doing so.  I don’t know when I will next have the opportunity to put my feet in the Willamette in mid-November, or lay down on the grass, in the pouring rain, singing. I’m glad I got those chances this weekend.

One last bit about the video. There’s still the bridge section, entirely separate from everything I’ve described so far. It’s an empty room. A lonely girl. And no way out. It might be that that this room is her emptiness, loneliness, in the video. The room is all the regular, mundane, dull things in life, keeping her trapped, keeping her from the strange, vivid, vibrant colors out there in the world. And, when you find yourself wrapped in dull normalcy, without the right imagination, it really can be impossible to escape it. Often the only way out is to fold into your own mind, let go of what you see, what you’re trapped in.

Or it might be that we’ve got an empty room in our house for a week, and didn’t have any better ideas for what to do with that bridge.

I’ll let you decide.

Thanks for taking this stream of consciousness journey with us this week. If you enjoy the song, the video, the stories or anything else we do here, you can share this post with your friends and subscribe for email updates.

Allie

PS – We have fewer than 10 videos remaining in our 2011 challenge. And we have every intention of going out strong. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more great songs and great stories!

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