Premiere: Jo Meares – Reasons

It is with great delight we premiere the amazing new video for artist Jo Meares‘s spectacular new single ‘Reasons’.

There is such a haunting quality to both the song and the perfectly matched video that seems to capture the cyclical nature of life – natural processes that are disturbing, intimidating yet so breathtakingly beautiful.

Meares says:

…lyrically the song is all about nature – the wildness, the mystery, and the poetry that we are caught up in. It is meant to be hopeful in the Quixotean sense of chasing windmills, dreams, great loves and journeys and always failing but returning back to the metaphorical highwire… fire.

This is a song perhaps born out of the shocking bushfires that rent Australia at the beginning of the year, but also has a personal element – it was written by Meares after attending the funeral of a friend’s father.

Meares has a voice that evokes a life lived to the fullest – tired, weary and battling the endless vicissitudes of life with a stoicism and resolve. And he expresses this in a milieu of impossible beauty and clarity of thought that sends shivers down your spine. Subtle rolling melodies amidst an environment of shifting sounds, noises and aural shadows form a veritable architecture of sound that moves around Meares’s deep, sonorous vocals.

This precise and lush production and instrumentality can clearly be sheeted home to the close collaboration with producer Anth Dymke whose talents even stretch to editing the accompanying video. The song ends in an upbeat uplifting drive – perhaps signifying regrowth and hope captured by the lyrics:

The birds they sing for you
The stream it flows for you
And then no more

I will give you one, 
I will give you five
I will give you ten thousand reasons to be alive

The video is inextricably linked to the song: a tiny figure standing before the most scary, powerful face of a thick, seemingly impenetrable forest – think of the feelings evoked by the British horror film The Witch. It is ominous, intimidating, rendering humanity so small and powerless – a fitting epithet for the forces of nature unleashed by the inferno of bushfires. It is exquisitely beautiful and moving:

This is the very epitome of the description cinematic – visual poetry that evinces the mood and stunning nature of the song itself and a mesmerising tableaux that induces awe and wonder. This collaboration between Meares and Dymke is creating some extraordinary.

You can download or stream the single here and it’s out tomorrow, Friday, 16 October 2020.

You can catch Meares and violinist Michael Bridges playing at Sydney’s MoshPit on October 25th, alongside Suburban Bukowskis – full details here.