Video Premiere: Hermitess - "Still City"

Hermitess is the project of songwriter, visual artist, and harpist Jennifer Crighton. Under this moniker, she recently released a haunting three song EP entitled Tower. We are big fans of Crighton’s work; her new release was featured as a “Quick Pick” and is quickly climbing the charts of our Spotify Top 40 playlist. Our love for Hermitess makes this video premiere even sweeter!

Before checking out this incredible premiere, read what Crighton offered up about the video and the song itself.

About the song:

“The song speaks to those things about living in a city that we are suddenly thinking about a lot more these days, how a city is where we gather for “nightlife”, it’s where the majority venues musicians depend on for shows are, and we come and stay in cities to work in bigger groups, to immerse ourselves in cultural scenes and personal networks. At the same time city life can feel very alienating and lonely, especially when isolated, and we usually consider a city at night to be not a safe place... Being alone on an empty city street feels very different from being alone in a forest for instance. One of the things that defines this the most for me are city lights, having grown up in a small town, having spent a lot of time in rural nighttime darkness, knowing how different that is, the nature sounds, familiarity with the light from the moon and stars. The thing I find hardest about living in the city is all electric light; obscuring our view of the stars, producing weird moving shadows, the electric humming and acid glow of Halogens and the harsh blue of LED light ... it has a way of making the places that remain dark in spite of all that illumination conspicuous, making darkness something dangerous rather than just the natural state of the night.”

In regards to the video, Crighton explained:

“We filmed “Still City” just after dark in downtown Calgary a week or so before the lockdown was lifted. It was just the two of us, me and my friend Tatiana, in the Alley behind the Palomino with a gimbal and my phone. It was early June, and it was very strange to be in that location at that time on a perfect summer evening and have it be so deserted - any other night of any other year in recent memory at 11pm around Stephen Ave would be busy and full of people and noise, all of it felt very surreal. Ironically circumstances were also ideal for a DIY shoot because we did not need to worry about working around the usual activity that would have been there on a normal night, but it also was one of the first times I’d been downtown during the lockdown, so we both felt the strangeness of it.”

Enjoy “Still City” below and purchase the Tower EP here.