Sleepology - Video Premiere: "Opening Act"

I feel renewed inspiration after watching this video from Port Huron's Sleepology. Their song, "Opening Act," is a defiant lament, a championing of the underdog slog, overruling the naive daydreams of breaking through some indie-rocker ceiling and embracing every aspect, good, bad, fun, ugly, funny, memorable, annoying, embarrassing, or glorious....yes, every aspect  creating and performing music  for the love of it, for the experience of it. It's the first single a forthcoming album.



There's nothing remarkable about the visuals of this video and yet as a whole--they attain profundity. We're in a practice space, with walls draped in posters and paraphernalia, pictures and rememberances, with four players fit in a 15"-by-15" room cluttered with pedal boards and amps and drums and mics, while we occasionally go for a go-pro ride at the top of their fretboards. We see set lists and flyers from past shows; eventually a sense of their camaraderie just starts to sparkle in the glimpses of their expressions--that sense of the road these guys have traveled together...

...And then we get a montage of intimate footage of previous performances, adventures from tours, shots of bands they've shared stages with...We see the mundane, the silly, the spectacular, we see the green rooms and we see the crowds mingling, we see soundchecks and quickie-mart runs and we see the Uhaul getting stuck in a bog of Michigan snow. And then we hear those lyrics...

...No one's in line for the opening act // Hello! We're HERE! We're the opening act!...

Now when you're in the middle of a sleek and shreddy rock song like this, building the tension on the hi-hats before coming back down on the snares and toms, charging the bass through the bridge while the psychedelically-wa-wa'ed gutiar glides out that sweet solo and the chorus kicks back in...when you are in the middle of THAT......then rock music and the experience of the band's glory is at its zenith.

And Sleepology's new song, to me, is about finding a kind of zen-balance of appreciating every single moment beyond just the narrow hour-glass-sized fleeting four minutes of a song's intensity and experiencing and enjoying every step of the journey, from playing outside of a basement, to playing in front of an audience, to loadig up the shitty cars to go play a song in some backyard... "I never thought we'd get that far..." And yet, a band can keep going farther....

I wanna see Sleepology go farther. And farther. We all get discouraged or disenchanted with our pursuits, but it's because our perspectives might be off, or our motives might be confused. This band, this song, helps me see the light of it again... All of it, the bad, the weird, the fun, it's all part of the experience.

Sleepology is Ryan Miloch, Eddie Lee, James Zimmer, and Jordan Monni.

Recorded at SchwonkSoundStead - Port Huron, MIVideo By MilochMediaLab