The music video has been with us for a long time. At its best, it can add something to the song it accompanies, deepen, widen, heighten the sonic experience, and add an extra dimension to the music tself. And that is exactly what is going on in Dan Cooney’s video for his latest single, “This Feeling.”
If Dan creates a dreamlike vibe musically, a sound that ebbs and flows between soft cascades of chords and more strident strumming, understated lulls, and wide-screen cinematic sounds, the video then provides extra sensory information, additional sentiments that can’t be conveyed by word or song.
As he pours out his feelings, we follow him through New York City. As the crowds swirl and people go about their day-to-day business, the feeling of being alone in a crowd, amplified by the passing of the urban mass that only a city provides, becomes all too clear.
Ironically, the video has two characters: the obvious one, Dan Cooney, the focal point, but also the city itself, the backdrop to the whole narrative, towering over proceedings, stationary and solid, the antithesis of the fluid and flexible nature of the human condition.
The city is cold to us as individuals. The people around us are too wrapped up in their own lives to care, and the dreamlike indie music that Dan weaves is merely one more sound swallowed up by the metropolis. Never has a video revealed so much about being lost and alone, unrequited and isolated, without actually seeming to do very much at all. Subtle!
