Premiere: Casey Ahern tangled in dramatic misunderstanding in new video, ‘Just a Dance’

It’s quite easy to get caught up in every twisted strand of lovesick emotions. We’re only human beings looking to be loved after all. But infatuation can often blind us from the truth that hangs as thick, all-consuming fog. Out of southern California, country upstart Casey Ahern finds herself caught in a sticky web of miscommunication and poor timing, as she sweeps across the barroom floor with another man. Innocently playful, yet glazed with profound implications, her song “Just a Dance” is paired with a warmly amber visual, premiering today, and untethers the initial emotional impact with a delicate performance. “It was nothing more than just a dance,” she coaxes her real beau out of his trembling, vein-popping state of anger.

Ahern’s vulnerability sharpens upon a bedrock of fiddle, acoustic guitar and peppered drum work. She laces each breath with yearning, but such poetic bravado doesn’t muddle the confusion. In fact, it punctures the tension. The music video, directed by Haley Ahern, certainly does not avoid the very uncomfortable nature of the lyrics; it simply extends the intensity until it snaps. “The yellow lights / The swing of the crowd / He just grabbed my hand / And spun me ‘round and around / But that was all / It didn’t last,” sings Ahern, whose words paint a charcoal portrait, detailed yet pointed. In arresting with such plainspoken images, she heightens them through soaking the listener in pools of country music tradition and simplicity. Sometimes, less is worth far more.

“Before I even went into the studio to record, Haley listened to a scratch vocal-guitar recording of [the song] that I recorded on my phone. She thought we could really emphasize the story told in the song and began conceptualizing a video for it. She’s extremely talented when it comes to visual story-telling,” Ahern writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “and she wrote out, second-by-second, each moment in the video ⏤ from the camera angles matching her choreography to the lighting cues and the raw emotions she wanted to see the characters evoke.”

Ahern, whose style fractures somewhere between Joni Mitchell and The Eagles, glows with a special kind of spirit. Onscreen, she allows herself to become absolutely submerged in the story, and once the walls all come crashing down (and later reconstructed), you feel it just as swiftly as she. Circle G Ranch out in Santa Clarita, California the backdrop, “Just a Dance” beckons you forward into hues of golden and crimson rays of light, exchanged in particular moments to underscore the story’s grueling emotional unraveling. “Filming this video was such a learning experience. We had a crew of three, including Haley, and shot it all in one night,” says Ahern. “Since the location was out in the hills at night, we constantly had coyotes howling while we were rolling. So, in the middle of giving actors notes between takes, Haley would begin screaming, waving her arms around and running toward the coyotes to ensure that they’d stay away and quiet down. The funny thing is: we didn’t even need sound for the video since it was all overdubbed in editing. I think the cast was more fearful of her than the coyotes.”

“Just a Dance” samples Ahern’s new EP, Where I Run, expected in 2020.

Watch below:

Photo Credit: Emma Winkler

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