Boombox Blitz: Rob Drabkin relishes Iceland’s serenity in ‘Oh My (It’s a Good Life)’

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

The countryside tumbles and stretches the heart like a piece of neon. Clutched among the crystalline hills of Iceland, far and away from humanity, sipping on the thrill of the breeze, folk singer-songwriter Rob Drabkin unpacks a riveting stretch of cinema. “Oh My (It’s a Good Life)” zigs and zags over the crevices like a hawk surveying the land for prey, slinking across the rock and the bodies of water and the earth’s devastated, fragile edges with brawny finesse. “Sit beneath the morning sun / And gone away, washed away / Watch the clouds go by,” he chirps, as the sun peaks over the horizon. The dazzling yellows and oranges dance across the landscape, and Drabkin not only drags along such a gentle touch but a melancholic slump, too.

The music video, which is directed by Dillon Novak (Issues, Everfound), is awash in wanderlust, as intimately potent as it is generally universal. “‘It feels like we’re on Mars.’ That is what we kept saying while filming in Iceland. It was easily the most challenging, epic and enjoyable shoots I’ve been a part of,” says Drabkin, whose starstruck gaze seems to capture the land’s many riches, too. The video “reminds us that the most powerful moments in life can be the simplest. I wanted to give viewers an extraordinary experience. Iceland gave us just that. The whole island feels like a geographic phenomenon, making us question if we were on a different planet all together.”

An exhaustive filming schedule enhances the video’s vitality for not only the viewer but Drabkin’s own trek in this life. He is a cloud simply rolling on by, but through exploring the inner mechanics of his soul and being in such a locale, he comes to greater understanding of his role in this tragically beautiful existence. “We worked our butts off, waking up each morning at 3 am in Reykjavik to travel the island and fight dangerously high winds and miserably cold rain. We shot in hidden waterfalls, glaciers, geothermic fields, black sand beaches, Viking villages and Northern Lights,” Drabkin further chronicles of his excursions through and across the Icelandic terrain, which operates as an extension of the undiscovered treasures of his mind. The visual stars actress Hildur Sif, who steps into the role of a mysterious lover and road companion embarking on her very own tale of freedom.

“Oh My (It’s a Good Life),” lifted from his Beautiful Day EP, is the kind of shiny, yet evocative, mid-tempo anthem we all need as we begin to shed 2018 and walk triumphantly into a new year.

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