Life's most profound moments are often its most ordinary: the sound a key makes when you unlock your front door; the feel of your own weight as you rise in the morning or the simple act of breathing. The Los Angeles-based singer Simone White explores the deeper meanings of otherwise mundane moments like these in a new video for the song "Flowers In May," from her latest album Silver Silver.
The video, from director Chris Wilcha and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, is a beautiful, aching memory of a friend who has died. The music and imagery are as spare as the moments White recalls in the song's lyrics: flowers blooming in the rain, the distant roar of an early morning jet, doing the laundry.
"The feeling I was trying to convey in the song had to do with the way I felt so strangely alive after she died," says White. "It felt psychedelic: feeling myself moving through space, acutely aware of being in my body, on the earth. My hand on a doorknob, opening the door, going outside, put one foot after the other, turn to look, there's the house.
"Every moment seemed precious. The banal little details of the day were magnified and became beautiful and important. There seemed to be a constant presence reminding me that I was alive and it felt like a tremendous gift. And I had to feel every moment, because she could not."
"Flowers In May" is the opening cut to Silver Silver, out now on Honest Jon's records. It's Simone White's fourth full-length. You can hear another standout cut from the record, "Big Dreams And The Headlines," on our All Songs Considered mid-year music review.
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