© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
🎧 Help keep the Spring Membership Drive short! Support the Buy-Back Campaign today before the Friday, March 29th deadline. Tap here to donate 💖

First Watch: Whispertown Shows Stunning 'Parallel' Worlds

Merriam-Webster defines parallel as, "extending in the same direction, everywhere equidistant, and not meeting." The luscious and expansive song, "Parallel," from Morgan Nagler's indie project Whispertown and the accompanying music video both explore the term in magnificent ways. The video, made from creative commons videos on YouTube edited together by Morgan Nagler's brother (he wishes to go by "Morgan's Brother") illustrates the concept of parallel by showing a myriad of different scenarios that mimic each other. It's a bit of magic, really.

"My Brother has blown my mind, truly taking this song to the next level, with this inspired video he made," Morgan Nagler writes. "Totally unprompted by any of my thoughts on the song or otherwise, this is what it meant to him. And it means the world to me. Thanks, Brother!"

The entire video is split into two sides that always show incredibly different subjects going through extremely similar motions, such as each screen showing a dancer a world apart from each other or microscopic particles pulsing next to an infinitely large sun. The director shows us this because, as he writes, he believes that "art for entertainment can also be educational and art is a tool that can change the way people think so please use it wisely."

The music video may zoom out to incredibly large scales but Morgan Nagler says the song had very personal beginnings: "I wrote 'Parallel' as almost an open letter to my dear friend Jenny Lewis." Later she realized it had many meanings: "The further you get from it, it reveals itself even further, as an open letter to everyone and everything on every planet in every Universe and beyond ... . Because at the core, we are all the same."

The song "Parallel" is from Whispertown's EP of the same name that was released in March of 2012. It is available here

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

In 1988, a determined Bob Boilen started showing up on NPR's doorstep every day, looking for a way to contribute his skills in music and broadcasting to the network. His persistence paid off, and within a few weeks he was hired, on a temporary basis, to work for All Things Considered. Less than a year later, Boilen was directing the show and continued to do so for the next 18 years.