"Needles River" is the first single from Melaena Cadiz's upcoming album Deep Below Heaven. She wrote and recorded the song with her husband, Mikael Kennedy. Kennedy also conceived and directed the video.
"I was thinking about that idea of fleeing, of a community exodus towards a hopefully better life," Cadiz tells us. "I asked my husband, Mikael Kennedy, to make the video — he's a photographer and he'd never made a music video before. I always feel his photography creates a visual world so perfectly in line with the music I'm working on. We talked about the song being an incantation, the overlaid images fading and appearing like a spell, maybe visually suggesting many voices with parallel stories."
Kennedy tells he rarely has a plan when he starts a project. "It's more about just starting it and seeing where it takes you," he says. "The overlaying images was an accident that ended up working really well with this song. I was wandering around the valley in Vermont where I grew up, shooting footage, listening to the song again and again and I began to feel like I was listening to the voice of a community, of a group exodus. It felt heavy, with the weight of history and mythology to me."
Deep Below Heavenis due out May 20 on Wild Kindness Records.
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