David Bronson

I was recently asked to write a few of my personal thoughts about the ‘Times’ video for a press outlet, so I thought I’d post them here before the next single comes out (any day now):

Robbie Mangano, David Bronson, and Maria Neckam during the shooting of the official music video for ‘Times’

In general I like it when things have numerous layers of meaning, probably because that’s how life is, and since this is a record where there are layers upon layers built in, I really like the idea of the videos having some of that depth as well.

I thought ‘Times’ in particular was a perfect song to play with this idea, since it’s at least partially about the very notion of multiplicity in things – even the song title attests to that. On the other hand I’m also very drawn to a certain degree of clarity and simplicity (from a practical as well as aesthetic or conceptual point of view). So the challenge was to come up with a concept for the video that somehow expressed what, to me, were the important themes of the song (movement, growth, etc., which tie very significantly into the larger album as a whole), as well as something that was almost instantly grasp-able as an idea, both visually and conceptually.

As far as the actual production was concerned – we all had a fantastic time making this video – it was an incredible amount of planning work (and took three full days of shooting!) to get all the correct angles and configurations of players covered, and significantly more than that in the editing and post-production, but everyone involved was very happy with the results, myself certainly included.

And I had a lot of fun putting in little visual/conceptual touches (like the time of day outside the window changing to the beat of the song – another demonstration of varying “times”) – for me these are just other little metaphors for the larger themes. There are even three, very quick, little visual references to the ‘Story’ itself, if you’re fast enough to spot them (hint: look for the album artwork).