Earlier this summer, John Cale released the acclaimed POPtical Illusion, his second album in just over a year. And now, the artist has released the video for the song, “Davies and Wales,” directed by the Emmy-nominated Jethro Waters. As a whole, the music video is lovely because of how each scene visually tells a story about the different decades of life. Also, in certain scenes, an actress does a great job of expressing themselves by using their bodies to symbolize what this song means.
While talking about the song, Cale says: “‘Davies and Wales’ is such a perfect example of the kind of things that only John Cale can do all at once: upbeat, melancholic, happy, shapeshifting, nostalgic, modern, beautiful heartache. There is such a melange of feelings packed into this song – his youth in Wales, his time in NYC and California – and I wanted to try and translate that time travel in a joyful, purposeful way.”
Cale has always been a musician of the times, helping to usher in titanic shifts in sound and culture. The bleeding edge drones of his Sun Blindness Music opened the path to The Velvet Underground. The frantic rock of Fear and Slow Dazzle, not to mention his production with Patti Smith and the Stooges, framed a half century of punk, post-punk and art-rock to come. And his curiosity about the way electronics could be more than a gimmick in rock music served as an inspiration to an uncountable number of crucial scenes.
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