Singer/guitarist Shana Cleveland does a beautiful lot with very little. When she's not the frontwoman of understated beach-rock group La Luz, she's making introspective, quietly masterful work in her solo project, Shana Cleveland & the Sandcastles. In her Sandcastles configuration, Cleveland is working primarily with her own soft vocals and acoustic guitar. This video, for "Itching Around" from her debut solo album, Oh Man, Cover the Ground, is more from where that mellow came.
The clip follows Cleveland on the road and then bored — "itching around," as it were — in her claustrophobic apartment. Of the video, Cleveland said in an email:
The album as a whole has a lot of natural imagery, but this song is more about the moments in between being free in the world. I've been traveling so much lately that the times when I'm not on tour have become really strange slow days that I'm never sure what to do with.
Director Carlos Lopez and Cleveland were inspired by French New Wave films, she said, specifically "the lightness and introspective nature of some of the genre's heroines." Lopez and Cleveland shot the film on a Super 8 camera, perfectly illustrating the warm fuzziness of Cleveland's audio production. Her cascading guitar work sounds exactly at home as she stares out from a bridge at water below her. Not very much happens in this video, but Cleveland makes every moment resonate.
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