Premiere: Psychic Lines dabbles in stop-motion animation for ‘Snowball’s Chance’ video

Waiting goes against everything we know about human nature. Time both stops and marches mercilessly on. But so goes existence, a game of roulette that tries our patience as much as thickens our skin. Louisville-born and Brooklyn-based, Philip Jacob (known as Psychic Lines) romanticizes the grey space in between, a state of being beholden to the past and future, and as his mind, body and spirit are held tenuously mid-air, he permits his words to fall like lead balls down, down, down to hit the earth with a deep-bellowed “thump!”  It hits its mark, there’s no mistake there, and with “Snowball’s Chance,” Jacob’s voice hangs as a harvest moon, a signpost to impending fall and winter’s haunted kiss.

“Melting snow in late July / Runs down the street, don’t cry / You’ll get your shot next year / They’ll fear your name,” he sings. The lingering death of winter, which is fleeting in the grand scheme of things, pricks on his tongue, and so, his phrasing is both languid and sweetly pointed. There’s a tingling of melancholy that sticks just behind his teeth, only peeking out on ends of lines like elastic melting on the sidewalk, but hope lets its own presence be known, too. The accompanying visual, premiering today, carries with it a child-like innocence, as if Jacob is seeking his youth as a way to bulldoze the present and cope and confront what is flickering right before his heavy eyelids. “So now you sit and wait at home / In your icebox you stow / Your last big ball of snow / To throw one day,” he sings with unfussy poetry.

Over 10 years, Jacob has wrangled various strands of indie-rock and folk music across countless records, letting his heart quake and bleed in appropriate amounts. But “Snowball’s Chance” unhinges an even more evocative chord in his work. “This is one of the few songs I wrote and recorded on a ukulele. My good pal Amos Fisher plays the clarinet. I can’t remember what comic strip it was, maybe ‘Calvin and Hobbes,’ but I recall some character trying to peg someone with a snowball they had been saving for summer,” Jacob writes to B-Sides & Badlands of the song. “I just thought that was a compelling idea. I’ve tried to find the actual strip a few times but no success. This music video was my first foray into stop-motion animation, so I was just going with the flow. It’s always exciting when you don’t quite know what you’re doing. My cat Gomez insisted on starring.”

“Snowball’s Chance” samples Jacob’s new album, Dance, Cartoon Skeleton, which is now up for pre-order (officially drops May 24).

Watch below:

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