The Los Angeles, CA based musician talks about the psychedelic-90’s-inspired music video for ‘Close To Home’- the first single off his upcoming LP Obsessed and Overwhelmed
Los Angeles, CA based rock musician and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Deathrich has just announced that his upcoming record Obsessed and Overwhelmed will be released one song at a time, beginning January 15th.
After releasing an EP titled Homeward Path while living in San Francisco circa 2018, Deathrich moved to LA and begun work on what would eventually become Obsessed and Overwhelmed - after months of work, we have finally the lead single off the record, a reverb soaked, 90’s-inspired, psychedelic gem titled ‘Close To Home’. We spoke with Deathrich about the inspiration for the track and the creative process behind the surreal music video it’s paired with
What inspired the creation of ‘Close To Home’?
The song kinda sprang up out of nowhere. I remember being maybe a third of the way through writing the lyrics when I got totally stuck and didn’t know where to go from there. At the time I was in a kinda turbulent relationship with someone, and so since that was on my mind I decided to pull from that experience to finish the lyrics. So ultimately it wound up being a sort of breakup song, but there’s other thematic elements in there.
Who did you work on the sick psychedelic music video with? What was the artistic process behind creating the film like?
The process of making this video was insane. It took us close to a year to finish it. We went into it with a vague plan, lots of scrapped ideas and story boards that wound up never being used. Eventually we just decided to set up a green screen in my living room and start filming. People would throw out ideas and I’d just be like “Yeah, let’s do it!” For instance, my roommate at the time, Kat Napier, had all these skulls. It was her idea to take one and turn it into a puppet, which wound up being a major part of the video. She also was a major help doing camera work and setting up lighting. Joe Sams, aka Uncle Dad Productions, suggested the slime on my face that we could green screen out. That wound up being a huge development because that shot wound up being used for the album art.
So once we got all of the footage we needed, it was passed off to my friend Gnoblar who does video effects. All of the insane glitchy and psychedelic stuff is him being a mad scientist at his video rig which takes up like an entire six foot long desk in his room. He went in and messed with the footage we made, then finally passed it all off to Tyler Rodriguez, who edited it all together. So the final product is a crazy combination of Gnoblar’s video effects and Tyler’s editing. Both of them were also very present on set, throwing out ideas and operating the camera and just generally making it all happen.
I think it we had gone in with a plan, the video may not have taken so long to complete, but I think there’s a certain charm to how we sorta fumbled our way through and figured it out as we went along. I think it led to some ideas that otherwise might have been overlooked. We had a lot of fun shooting, we were just winging it and using whatever resources we had at our disposal. All of the aforementioned crew took time out of their busy schedules to make this video happen, and I honestly can’t thank them enough.
When can we expect your debut album and more importantly - what can we expect?
I decided to release Obsessed and Overwhelmed one song at a time rather than all at once. So over the coming months I’ll be releasing songs, and I got it set up so that anyone who pre-orders the album on Bandcamp will be able to download the tracks as they drop. It will be on all the streaming services like Spotify, as well. As far as what to expect, there’s some weird stuff on this album. I tried a lot of new ideas, like more synth-driven tracks, weird arrangements, lots of shorter songs, hopping around between styles. I’m very stoked to show people! Also, you can expect many more music videos. I have a few ready to be released and more in the works. The goal is to make as many videos as possible for this album, so we’ll have to wait and see how many that winds up being.
