Premiere: Alright Alright teeter on the edge in ‘The Liar’ video

Our youth crackles as quickly a freshly-decayed coating of leaves. The crunch is as devastating as the fall itself. The passage of time unceremoniously both traps us forever in the present and sends as careening into the future ⏤ you could say adulthood is a swift throat-punch of a transition that you can never see coming. Denver folk duo Alright Alright bear such a searing reality with their new video for “The Liar,” a time-weary slow-dance from their 2018 studio record, Nearby. Husband and wife, China and Seth Kent examine every wrinkle rippling across their lives, drawing their hands into golden morning light that cuts in angular shards through the living room windows.

“There was a fire, cross that fairway from our home” reads the tone-setting first image. A flame ignites and seems to engulf the pair of musicians, who not only gasp for air but pull you into the swirling smoke. “The kid was a liar, he had started it on his own / With hairspray and a lighter, burnin’ bugs up in the eves / The fire department couldn’t get there leaving only ash and grief,” Seth continues to let the story-song ebb and flow with the descent of misery and uncertainty. China’s powdery alto weeps faintly in the background, penetrating between puffs of acoustic guitar and drums.

“I have said that the song was imagining the life of a kid who burned his family’s house down, but that is largely false. really, on two accounts,” confesses Seth over email to B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the woeful visual today. “First, the song is actually from the perspective of someone who watched the fire. These days it feels like it is about the foolishness and idealism of youth and the transition into adulthood that is something we so often avoid. Second, it also has, of late, held the complexities of China and I pursuing our dreams and holding what is ‘worth it’ in a dream. But even in that, I also recognize that the song will hold different meanings for different people.”

“Oh the hours, sitting up there on the roof / We were inspired by the sunset and the folly of our youth,” they paint, their pain twisting together with the fictional tale of ruin. “We started slippin’ backward, grasping desperately at straw / Crying out to Jesus cause a myth was what we saw.” But the most brutally poetic of art is unearthed from very real wounds, and so, Seth and China explore the rocky mountaintops and emerald green valleys of their relationship, delicately but unapologetically exposing it all. “For me, ‘The Liar’ is about a relationship that is on the brink of ruin, hanging by a fingernail off of a cliff. Somehow, miraculously, the couple figures out how to save themselves in the song,” writes China. “I still almost cry when we sing it together.  He put some very personal lines in the song.”

The third stanza unfolds even more to the heart-rending vitality of the story. “Easter morning felt so holy, God I swear I’d made it through / At the sound of a cracked bell, oh the hand I brushed was you / Ashes in the garden, growing hops and hollyhocks / Answers in the roses, and the aspen leaves that dropped,” the words fall from their hearts. Such imagery calls upon “a time early in our relationship when Seth was at his wits’ end about his employment situation,” notes China, detailing the song’s potency from real life. “He drove up into the Rocky Mountains with a sleeping bag and a flashlight, spent the night and came back with an ‘answer garden’ ⏤ a baby aspen tree and a wild rose bush. He planted those little mountain gifts in our front yard, and they are still there today.  We also have hops and hollyhocks growing in our yard, another line lifted from our life together.”

The music video, directed by Emily Grauberger, alongside principal photographer David Grauberger, is rich and slathered with their story of resilience and hope. Denver’s cherished music space Syntax Physic Opera is an apt backdrop to permit the song to reach an even more evocative peak. “David fell in love with the light and the artfully decorated bar, which is displayed in an old Colorado aesthetic. There is a very special vibe about the place, and we wanted to incorporate the western saloon look with the video,” says China. Seth adds, “One thing I have come to love is to collaborate in such a way and with the sort of folks who are able to make great art.”

Perched at the bar top, Seth seeks a numbing agent at the bottom of a bottle of Laws Whiskey, which stings his lips right down to his lungs. “It is my absolute favorite whiskey probably on the planet right now and definitely of all Colorado whiskeys. It is the Laws Straight Rye Cask Strength. It is smooth with a little water added, spicy when totally neat, and has some miraculous notes of caramel,” he says, also noting his interaction with “The Bartender,” his friend and local restaurateur, Chad Michael George. “That bottle was in fact the last of my 40th birthday gift from one of my very closest friends, so it carried a bit more meaning in that sense, too.”

Nearby is out everywhere now.

Watch below:

Photo Credit: Matthew Greenlee

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