Premiere: Cori Elliott sojourns through a sobering haze in new video, ‘Too Far Gone’

A heartbreak really did a number on Cori Elliott. Cut to 2018. Two lovers caught in orbit, a gravitational pull so strong that when things did fly off course, the end burned far brighter and longer than either supposed. An alt-pop singer-songwriter out of Los Angeles, a city with a host of heartbreakers and forlorn lovers trying to get by, Elliott found herself wandering from state to uncertain state, literally and metaphorically. She pours the cognitive elixir back into song with “Too Far Gone,” paired with a foggy, mesmeric visual, premiering today, and her voice stings but drags you in. “Let the road be our savior again,” she whispers.

Her willowy vocal erupts as an expressive beacon to themes of universal pain and numbness, writhing in a milky bath of synths and guitar. Even a rain-like crackle descends around her in the final few seconds. “Too Far Gone” means to document that severe breakup, but it also observes the mental price many of us continue to pay in a pandemic world. “Got drunk in the alley / You tried to tell me how much I mean to you,” the words creep along the barren, isolated streets found in the video, all shot and produced via iPhone. Its lyrical eeriness is deftly matched in the clip’s grainy distortions, underscoring Elliott’s agonizing journey through and out of the mess.

“I’m too far gone / Take the train straight home / Please remind me what happened in the morning,” the hook simmers on the surface, nearly stagnant as it wafts into the eardrums. Elliott crafts gutsy moodiness that is truly moving. It’s like the last words uttered before the sun sets one last time. It’s the wallowing on the bathroom floor with a bottle of red, mind only filtered through the buzz, and the tears soaking your sweatshirt.

In the aftermath of the split, Elliott, admittedly, “had sort of been drifting through LA, sleeping on couches before I finally found a spot to move into. I think during that time, there was so much going on emotionally and logistically that I was subconsciously absorbing that,” she writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “By the time I sat down to write the song, it came flurrying out as if it was waiting for the right moment for it to come out.”

The video goes even further, as a “sort of homage to LA with an ebb and flow of how I feel about it. From the struggles you can have getting around, maintaining relationships to the loneliness you can feel in a big city,” she says.

California was officially ordered on lockdown March 19, and Elliott immediately witnessed Los Angeles, usually bustling with smog and car horns, seemed like a scene from a zombie apocalyptic thriller. “[It] has been pretty wild. It’s pretty surreal seeing such a major city so empty and especially as I was walking around some places I would even frequent pre-COVID,” the Austin, Texas native offers. “I sort of try to balance the somewhat inherent depressing nature of the ghost town, dystopian qualities with the idea that nature in and around the city is getting to breathe in new life. Driving around felt like LA in the ’60s with the empty freeways and actually getting from the valley to the beach in 20 mins ⏤ how it was designed before all the ungodly traffic.”

“Too Far Gone” is the latest taste of Elliott’s new EP, Between Two Places, out everywhere August 21.

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