Premiere: Nick Teehan is ‘Just Waiting’ for love in new video

There’s few worse feelings in the world than the betrayal of your own body and mind. You make painstaking endeavors to turn your heart inside out, chancing exposure for a stroke of love. Exasperated and wallowing in the earth, soul-pop singer Nick Teehan crawls into himself with “a dark, frustrated love song with a fierce chorus,” as he puts it. “Just Waiting” claws at the air in his lungs, puncturing the outer flesh and releasing the unbearable flames and smoke, which then singe the lingering and shattered heartstrings. “Nobody loves me for my brain,” he spouts right from the beginning, situating the smoldering prayer as a soul-searching manifesto. “They say I’m intimidating / I’m getting laid but it’s so plain / Last time I did, I said the wrong name.”

It’s the garish language that roots him in place, only allowing him to bace back-and-forth on fractured, faded hardwood. “How often do you feel like your whole life just waiting for someone / I could be that someone,” he weeps into his coffee cup. And with his teardrops, staining his surroundings with drippy watercolors and pastel, he carves out the chest of humanity. “Just take it or leave it and move on / I could be that someone.” Teehan’s sensibilities call to the work of Rufus Wainwright and Ben Folds, and while much of Teehan’s music owes a great deal to his predecessors, there is a unique mark of victory embedded in his arrangements, plucking delicate truths from his own being.

Premiering today, via B-Sides & Badlands, the accompanying music video, directed by Molly Rupert and shot in Philadelphia, bleeds with a frightful metaphor of a haunting snake-man, beastly and unrelenting. The frantic camera work, exacerbated by Teehan’s terrified features, sweat flowing down his brow, crawl underneath the skin to evoke overwhelming dread, that a being of such fantastical proportions could, in fact, stomp this physical world to dust. “Couldn’t have always been this way / I think that it started in the ninth grade,” he weighs the worth of his soul. He’s put to the test, head into the fire, and he remains seemingly unscathed. “I wanted to go they made me stay / Wanted to go they made me stay.”

“Just Waiting” is lifted from his upcoming album, These Little Things, his first release in nearly seven years.

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