Premiere: Salim Nourallah is only a ‘Moving Man’ in new video
The folk singer-songwriter wrestles with the absence of his kids.
Our lives are pretty mundane. Sure, it’s speckled with sudden bursts of excitement, of joy, of contentment, but it’s generally an astonishing and poetic tragedy. We are ghosts gliding through this existence. Indie-folk singer-songwriter Salim Nourallah inhabits that airless void with his song “Moving Man,” in which he wrangles his feelings of being a single parent and the space between him and his two kids. “[It’s] a reflection of my life, so I thought it would be a bit silly to do some sort of slick video. I’m a single parent who only sees my kids part-time, and sometimes the gaps I’ve spent without them have been very difficult,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the neutralized music video, which was filmed by, wouldn’t you know, his two kids Miette, 8, and Gavin, 14.
The footage is fairly straightforward, ironing out his morning wakeup and sluggish stroll to the kitchen. There, he pours a bowl a cereal and plops on the couch between two ginormous stuffed animals. It’s heartbreaking, as his hardship is palpable and lingers in the room around him in ominous, unseen figurines. “It really doesn’t feel natural for me to be away from them so much. You don’t ever get used to it, what you do is accept it and try to make the most out of the situation,” he says. “So, ‘Moving Man’ deals with busying myself in order to not be swallowed whole by the sadness.”
The video’s shots are voyeuristic in nature, a seemingly random moment captured in time through the eyes of another. “Both kids have always enjoyed watching music videos, and for a couple years, it was one of our bedtime rituals. I’d let them pick out three videos, and they’d get all bug-eyed excited as we peered at the images being displayed on my tiny phone. They still request it every now and then,” says Nourallah, whose performance is both bewitching and plain.
Notably, Miette’s contributions served to tighten the lyrics even further. “Run away from the heartache / Run away from the pain / Run away from the sadness, screwed into my brain,” Nourallah mourns. The expression on his face says all you really need to know. “Miette got really serious about how she framed her shots. It was cool looking at her footage, because she’s so much closer to the ground than we are. There were some interesting angles, especially when she circled me on the couch. I wanted the video to be made up of two continuous shots, so we had to do it a few times to get it right. That meant making and wasting multiple bowls of cereal, which caused her a little bit of rule-breaking anxiety.”
“Moving Man” is lifted from Nourallah’s new EP, West, out tomorrow and will be included on his forthcoming long-player, Somewhere South of Sane, out September 28 on Palo Santo Records.
Watch below:
Photo Credit: Casey Pinckard
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