Exclusive: Quiet Life’s hazy summer video that'll take you to surf and sun
- Text by James Joiner
We live in a world of contradictions and half truths. One where clearly delusional billionaires can win the hearts of millions and carefully curated social media posts disguise the reality of those behind them. It’s an especially tricky time for music lovers – so much of what we hear is deliberately constructed and cleverly marketed to make us jump on an it-band’s bandwagon. Does it matter if your favourite song was written by a focus group rather than an artist who felt every word and note as they bled them? It’s a debate that can go on and on, and certainly will, but here’s one thing you can take to the bank: Quiet Life are the real damn deal.
Comprised at the core by brothers Ryan and Sean Spellman and supported by a rotating cast of friends and counterparts, Quiet Life’s folk-fringed rock and blues pulls immediately at the nostalgia strings in your heart. It’s like you know the songs, even if you haven’t heard them before. Written as the duo crisscrossed the country in their vegetable-oil-fueled van, surfing and painting and living an artistic, vagabond bohemian dream, these are the sounds of friends and sunshine and foggy days and leaving it all behind on the open road.
The road is where Quiet Life has lived these past couple years. Opening for acts like The Lumineers, the Head and the Heart, and Alabama Shakes, collaborating with My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and producing their newest album, Foggy, with Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken, it’s been a mostly smooth, organic ride to the top of their game.
This video, captured on an old Super 8 camera by photographer Nick Ventura and Sean, is almost too perfect a visual aid to their song Summer of ‘16. Grainy, hazy, glowingly analog, it pulls you in and primes you for the warm months and sandy feet ahead. By delivering 2016’s fun in the sun memories before we even make them Quiet Life hasn’t, as the media loves to imperiously declare, made the song of the summer. Instead they’ve made summer itself, preserved for your enjoyment and ready whenever you may need it.
“Nick and I actually met in the ocean, literally,” Sean tells me from mid-tour in Boulder, Colorado. “He was swimming around with a camera and I think I was probably floating on my back, or maybe falling off of a wave. Over the course of the next year Nick and I took a bunch of footage on his old Super 8 camera. Most of this film is from a hazy summer in Rhode Island, lots of cliff jumping and riding in his boat, real good New England scenes.
When it got cold I headed West and Nick shipped me his camera to play around with in California, Oregon, and Central America. We wanted to create a video that had no linear storyline, just some pleasant imagery that felt good and reminded us of our favourite season and stirred giddy anticipation of the coming summer.”
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