Premiere: Eliza Niemi “Walking Feels Slow” Music Video
BOLD AND DIRECT — Eliza Niemi gives it to us straight in her new “Walking Feels Slow” music video. Showcasing the soft and creative side of her music, the “Walking Feels Slow” video features live animation and stunning circuit-bending visuals overlapped with Niemi’s surreal performance of the piece. The video draws the viewer in with each moment thanks to its aesthetically pleasing look and textures but keeps the viewer engaged with its shattering of the fourth wall and pointedness.
Directed by Ali Vanderkruyk (dir. “Glass” by Eliza Niemi), this is the pair’s second collaboration. The video goes beyond the “fourth wall” of filmmaking and invites the audience to be a part of Niemi’s emotional journey by way of a passionate performance given by none other than Niemi herself.
Read below to learn more about the process of creating the music video for “Walking Feels Slow,” what Niemi has been up to lately, and upcoming projects.
LUNA: How are you, how are things, what’s been going on?
NIEMI: Right now I am holed up in Toronto, sculpting my touring band members out of FIMO (modeling clay). Half of them live in DC so we couldn't all get together for a picture before this upcoming tour. So I'm making these miniatures to photograph for the poster. I was just visiting the two of them that live down there and we had a great little three-piece jam. I also saw the Laurie Anderson exhibit while I was there and was blown away. I'm still buzzing from it. I'm so excited to add in our fourth member, Avalon (who I play with here in Toronto), for this release tour in September. We’re announcing the dates very soon :)
LUNA: The video is so well done! How did the idea for this one come about?
NIEMI: I wish I could take any credit for it, but this one was all the amazing Ali Vanderkruyk. The song itself is sort of a meditation — a bunch of little mantras — so she wanted the video to be concise and contemplative. Ali's really great at listening to a song a bunch of times and intuiting the perfect visual accompaniment. She's never too on-the-nose about it when she pitches me ideas. She sorta just explains exactly what she wants to do, and it always sounds great and then we do it. Then the complex brilliance of it slowly unfolds before me and I trip out about how perfectly it represents the song. This has happened with every video we've made: "If My Songs Made You Cry" and "Glass."
Her intermingling of digital and film techniques ended up perfectly embodying the in-between state that the song is about. There's a narrative there about wrestling with yourself in deciding whether to give in to your chaotic desire for instant gratification or to embody a calm slowing down. There's also a loneliness to the song that I think her video really captured. Which is funny because this is the only co-write on the record (I made it with my friend Will/Toad/Free Music). It's sort of about the particular breed of loneliness you feel within an intimate long-distance friendship. It's like you're always caught in between. Like this friendship, the video is lonely but also deeply playful.
LUNA: What was the creative process of shooting the video like?
NIEMI: Since Ali and I have worked together so much before it felt familiar and smooth. She knew exactly what she wanted from me and how to get it. Apparently my signature move is staring blankly into the camera and lip syncing, which makes sense because I'm not too comfortable with much else. So we started with that. Then she told me about this face yoga stuff she'd been doing lately and got me to stretch my face around while singing. It felt really good — I was into it. We filmed it at Niagara Custom Lab in Toronto, where Ali used to work and where we got and processed the film. That's also where we filmed the "Glass" video.
LUNA: Favorite memory from shooting the video?
NIEMI: After we were finished we got to talking and Ali said, "You want a beer?" and I said, "Yeah," and we cracked a couple cold ones and sat at the back of the lab next to the train tracks and talked for a long time. What a great feeling, to be deep in a conversation and have it reciprocated and one-upped with an offer to dig even deeper/continue. We talked about the idea of people being on their first or second or 20th life, sort of like reincarnation I guess. We agreed that we both feel a little bit old in that sense. Like it's not our first time around. I think she said she felt like she'd lived many lives… I can totally see that in her. I'm more in like a tween territory. It's not my first rodeo, but, as my friend Lauren said to me once (and it really stuck with me), it's my second.
LUNA: What sort of themes are you generally drawn to in songwriting?
NIEMI: I'm mostly drawn to the little details within bigger experiences. I've often written songs to process hard or heavy events in my life, and a place I like to start is what I could hear, smell, or see at the time. What people said, who I was with, etc. It sort of places me back in the zone of what I was going through and ends up representing the bigger gestures better than positing exactly what happened ever could. In terms of broader themes, I write a lot about love, death, family, life. A friend recently called my genre "slice of life" and I really like that.
LUNA: Anything upcoming that you’re excited about?
NIEMI: We're about to announce the album release tour in the coming weeks. We'll be playing all over the east coast of Canada and the US from Sept. 1–17. Keep your eyes peeled for that. We're playing with some of my favorite bands along the way. I cannot wait.
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