“friends” finds the singer closing a circle in the stunning Joshua Tree National Park
The scene opens on Leah Capelle, Breedlove in hand, walking out into the wild expanse of the Joshua Tree National Park. Soon, she is parked on a timeworn granite boulder, lightly fingerpicking her Pursuit Exotic Concert CE as an early autumn zephyr gently whips her long brown hair.
The vista unfolding behind her—a plain of the yucca palms that give the park its name, the bleached climb of the Little San Bernardino Mountains, the setting sun just kissing the horizon—is heroic, historic and dreamlike all at once.
“Can you think of a more beautiful place?” Capelle asks excitedly.
But a certain chaos is unfolding in flashback over the desert serenity.
This is the video for Capelle’s “friends,” which premiered recently through Atwood Magazine, and is now on YouTube, where Capelle, Breedlove’s’ Featured Artist for April, has been largely living since COVID struck.
As the video states from the outset, “this is part three.” “friends” completes a triptych, following edgy films for “on accident” and “know me better,” tracing as they do, the arc of a broken relationship.
Appropriately, they come from Capelle’s debut album, triptych, which the singer reminds us, pertains to the nexus of “my mental health side, my sexuality side and then the breakup side.”
Capelle released triptych in early April (read the Breedlove review), just as the current health crisis was staking its claim on the national psyche. Perhaps not the best timing, but Capelle was ready and confident that the music would cut through. It has and it continues to do so.
“It seems to be reaching into places that I wasn’t expecting it to,” Capelle, who remains broken-hearted about not being able to tour behind the album, says. “So that’s been fantastic to see, and it just makes me really proud that even amidst this stressful, scary and sad global period that we’re going through, people are still turning to music to heal and maybe to mourn at the same time.”
Those qualities, healing and mourning, are certainly reflected in “friends.” Capelle first performed the song, privately, as a gesture of peace to her ex, while they were on a final, post-split Joshua Tree sojourn.
As romance goes, the song fell on deaf ears.
“Unfortunately, the idea of remaining friends didn’t work out,” Capelle says. “That seems to be a closed door, which is totally fine.”
“It’s all very real,” she says, with a catch in her voice, of the album’s personal storyline.
But, with the grand circularity that art demands and life provides, Capelle returned to Joshua Tree in September with her new paramour, director Didier Konings, to create the basis of the clip.
While the footage was shot in the “before” days, Capelle has been busy since, editing the video, which, as noted, pulls in elements from “on accident” and “know me better,” on her own time and her own dime, putting the quarantine to good advantage and teaching herself color grading along the way.
“It took me nine months to really get the vision right,” Capelle says. “It ties up the storyline and you get the memories of the previous videos in parallel with the performance aspect. It was a labor of love, but I think it came out beautifully. I’m really proud of the way that it all came together.”
Capelle will soon be adding even more content to her YouTube and social channels, with an additional clutch of her popular livestreams planned over the next few weeks, as well as a behind-the-scenes series, also filmed by Konings, about the making of the album.
Learn more at leahcapelle.com
