Boombox Blitz: Pieternel learns to ‘Run No More’

Welcome to Boombox Blitz, an artist spotlight series showcasing overlooked singers, songwriters and musicians who are quietly taking over the world.

Falling in love is like being reborn as a butterfly from a cocoon. You shed your former self and (perhaps) jaded way of thinking, discard the carcass and emerge more self-possessed, light and free. It’s not too much to ask, and genre-blurring singer-songwriter Pieternel finds herself summoned to the great yonder of bliss with her new song and video called “Run No More.” She’s rendered nearly speechless as she navigates the cityscape on a treadmill, hitting up such bizarrely-unexpected locations as smack-dab in the middle of a buzzing freeway, a graffitied skater park and an industrial wasteland to capture herself as much as the sting of Cupid’s arrow between her fingertips.

Directed by Jasper Goedman, the visual leans into Pieternel’s habit for the eccentric and opens in a blow-up jolly-jumper. It’s colors bubble in stark contrast to the otherwise grey stretches of concrete and darkened alleyways that serve to piece together such a heighten reality. “I been waiting for you to calm the storm,” she sings, fluttering up and down on a playfully bright trampoline of production. There is an icy chomp with which she bites, but it’s soaked in optimism and cheer, as she soon succumbs to the descending limelight. “I met a man in NYC and completely fell in love with him. It was feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time, and it kind of scared me,” says Pieternel, whose voice barrels along as a freight train without a conductor. “It felt like a storm. But I decided not run from it but to face and embrace it.”

So, hook in hand, she turned to co-writers Gabe Cummins and Daniela Bauer to flesh out her new-found story of liberation. “Run No More” is an essential appetite-quencher for the Netherlands creative’s signature blending pop and folk music into a vitamin-approved diet. “I need more of your loving / I need huggin’ by the dozen / More of your kissing / All the things I’ve been missing,” she later galavants ’round and ’round on the chorus, a celebration in accepting things just as they are.

“Run No More” is lifted from her 2018 studio record, Roosevelt Island.

Watch below:

Follow Pieternel on her socials: Facebook | Instagram | Website