Our old pals in Balto recently shot and released a stirring and thought-provoking video for “Airplanes” from their excellent Monuments EP. Frontman Dan Sheron wrote to call my attention to the release, and here’s how he describes the video:
The video is an atmospheric short film shot in Portland, OR following the intersecting lives of 4 characters: A child dressed as superman, a grown man at a cubicle in the woods, and a young couple in a clawfoot bathtub.
There’s a lot more about the video and its genesis over on American Songwriter. Here’s a bit from that interview with Dan Sheron:
When I wrote “Airplanes,” I was thinking about the crushing loneliness that comes out of being far from home, the idealism that has put my friends and I in that sort of position, and the yearning for something simpler that often comes out of that experience. In 2010, I lived in an apartment above the Novy Arbat in Moscow, a multi-lane avenue where they run their big military parades towards the Kremlin. All night for a week or so in preparation for their big V-E day celebration, they practiced running their big war machines up and down the road, making it impossible to sleep. I remember being stuck awake, tangled up in my little bed, acknowledging my aloneness in a desperately sad way, and longing for home and normalcy. That experience wrote its way into the song like two years after it happened. And at the same time, a lot of the song hinges on the idea that home is more of a state of mind than an actual place, a final settling down, and that sort of permanence is still far away.
Check out the video below, courtesy of Vimeo.
Beautiful….