Premiere: Alias Patrick Kelly depicts stains of wartime in new video, ‘Invisible’
The Atlanta Americana singer-songwriter depicts post-war PTSD in his new video.
Effects of wartime range from night terrors, avoidance of reality, total detachment and rapid mood swings. Millions of combat veterans must bear the weight of such psychological trauma for the rest of their lives; the unimaginable atrocities they witnessed and endured will forever haunt them like ghosts. Re-acclimation to society tests both their emotional and physical well-being, sometimes for the worse, and while many certainly make a full recovery, on the surface at least, still others will never be able to face truly living ever again. It’s a tragic state of the modern world that’s bred tortured souls trying to pick up the pieces. With his new music video for “Invisible,” Americana singer-songwriter Alias Patrick Kelly taps into the very weary and withered aftermath of one veteran’s life, one embroiled in misery and mental swelling.
“And on the news I hear about / The ones who could not make it out / ‘Cause in their heads and hearts they stayed,” sings Kelly, whose voice snarls around the decay and sheer perilous situation. He confronts the gravity of post-war with raw earnestness, peeling back the layers with delicate precision but keeping his heart close to the vest. “Although I’m welcome here back home / I feel my way through this alone,” he later reveals a grave headspace with which so many veterans are burdened.
“Invisible,” lifted from Kelly’s new EP, An Unclaimed Inheritance, was co-written with Robin Bienemann and Marcus Trana during a songwriting event called Love on Holiday back in 2016. Alongside 40 or so other songwriters and musicians, all participants played a game of “spin the bottle” in groups of three to uncover their songwriting challenge. Kelly’s group spun the bottle and landed on a painting by Stephanie Trenchard depicting “a little boy in his front yard during winter wearing a camouflage jumpsuit of some kind,” says Kelly to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “He’d looked like he’d been playing war. In the foreground of the painting was a little girl who looked like she was telling him that it was time to come indoors. The girl looked like his older sister. They both had red hair.”
“They reminded me of two relatives who were grown now. As a grown up, the male relative spent time in combat over in Iraq. He’s had a hard time readjusting to civilian life since his return. The painting made me think about how when you’re a kid it’s fun to play war,” the Atlanta musician continues to outline the video’s harrowing concept. “But as an adult who actually participated in a war it’s an entirely different experience. Each verse tells a part of the entire experience ⏤ as a child it is play, as a soldier it is survival, as a survivor it is a hard readjustment after such an ‘elevated’ experience.”
Throughout the visual, Kelly fuses haunting shadows of combat through the narrator’s troubled mind. The imprint of catastrophe resurfaces in everyday things like grabbing a cup of coffee, and our protagonist soon discovers he’s far from alone. The truth is: such disaster is far too commonplace to be ignored. “I keep encountering people who have been affected by this. After seeing the painting and my interactions with my relative, there was no way that my co-writers and I could not write this song,” says Kelly.
An Unclaimed Inheritance drops everywhere this Friday (May 24).
Watch below:
Follow Kelly on his socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website
