Premiere: HeartMouth uncover hope in quarantine with new video, ‘I Think the World is on Fire’

A heartbeat throbs through HeartMouth‘s new song, “I Think the World is on Fire,” a sweeping, nearly-six-minute epic conceived in lockdown. With a global pandemic still ripping through people’s lives, singer-songwriter Casey Allen felt compelled to write and record a song for our times; it’s backing vocals eerily stitch together each of our own fragile mental states into a moving refrain, a plea for hope and health.

“I think the world is on fire / Everywhere I go / Another story unfolds / What we’re living in,” Allen sings with delicacy, at first. “Maybe I’m just tired / Of all the losses told / And watching halves of hearts restart / Without the other.” But once he gets started, and the song explodes as serpent-like firecrackers across an already weary skyline, the hurt, the anger, the exhaustion hangs as thick, black smoke.

“I remember when you took the last hit / And you found a way to look me in the eyes / Said that it’ll be okay / So just get in the car / And drive far away from here,” he later offers an escape route, letting the world as he knows it fade in his rearview. Alongside band mates Harrison Beam (bass) and Tyler Daniels (guitar/keys), the Four Oaks, North Carolina trio construct a platform on which to vent all frustrations, angst, unbridled rage over the state of things.

Diverting between stock footage and imagery from real-life events and an intimate, close-up shot from Allen’s home, the visual, premiering today on B-Sides & Badlands, underscores the urgency by which Allen delivers such a sucker-punch vocal performance. “I’m seriously more proud and excited over this song than anything I’ve ever done. Even if it winds up flopping, it just means so much to me,” he writes over email. “It’s breathtaking from start to end.”

“We hope everyone is down for a nearly six-minute-long song,” he quips. “It just took that long to tell the story.”

As we’re all adapting to what a new normal could look like, Allen was faced with an additional challenge: making sure to prioritize his own health. He explains, “My girl is an EMT and has had to handle COVID-19-positive patients, so we had to isolate from each other in our own home given my history of lung issues.” So, a song like “I Think the World is on Fire” unpacks an inescapable quandary, heightened through the song’s lengthy runtime and rich cinematic breadth.

“This song came from being confined to my little studio room. We wanted to prove that even during isolation, art and collaboration will still move forward. We have both friends and strangers-now-turned-friends playing roles on this song,” he says, “and it just feels so much bigger than [the band] itself. The song encompasses the spirit of people coming together during scary times, being vulnerable about it, and making something beautiful out of it.”

Watch below:

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