Lena Fayre, sixteen-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, has just released a music video for her highly acclaimed debut single, “Belong To You.” Rendered in stunning black and white, it plays more like a short film than a typical music video, telling the heart-rending story of a young couple torn apart as victims of bad choices. Scenes of amorous carousing spliced between romantic visions of a date, work as foils to remarkably gorgeous shots of doom: windows exploding, curtains whipping in the wind; silhouettes of both lovers rolling slowly in their car as shattered glass arcs inward like angular drops of water. The video closes on a dramatic plot twist with the sounds of sirens in the air.
[youtube gYaKPBinfXE]Directed by award-winning 23-year-old director from Cal. State Univ. Long Beach, Leah McKissock, and produced by Adam Blake Carver, the video is a work of awe-inspiring beauty and grief, exactly parallel to Fayre’s song, itself. McKissock’s direction is somehow delicate and sledgehammer-blunt at once. Each of her subjects are as plain to the eye as a still-life painting, yet with a subtlety that lets deep undercurrents of impending woe climb under the skin, where they build and push like dammed water until the deeply tragic closing scene unfolds.
