Premiere: Stevey turns pain into spellbinding dance piece in new ‘altitude’ video

A broken heart is not the end of something, it’s just the beginning. If you’re capable and willing to cross over the threshold, perhaps shedding the past on your way, you just might rediscover who you’re meant to be. Undergoing his own version of such a transformative process, Colorado folk-pop singer, songwriter and musician Stevey (full name Stevey Ertl) is both transfixed by former miseries and freed by them, further shattering it into smaller bits and pieces before glueing them back together in a stunning art exhibit. In his “altitude” music video, premiering today, which he co-directed with David Henning, Stevey takes the back seat for what can best be described as a spellbinding modern dance routine.

Dancers Maggie Jung and Bailey Ostdiek contort their bodies and flitter in and out of each other’s orbit. Much like the give and take of a toxic relationship, they are bound to one another and ultimately must cast asunder the entanglement in order to fully realize their own worth. “Airplane, airplane drifting along / Aimless in direction, we’re hitting a wall / We’re like a punctured balloon that once flew so light,” Stevey lets his words fall out of his mouth as a leaden ball through the skyway. “Riddled with a defect, we’re losing this fight / Falling from the sky / We’re falling from the sky,” he then unpacks with poetic frankness. His heart is as a waterfall foaming and hurling over the craggy edge into unknown, uncharted territory that could very well rip him to shreds. But his leap of faith, coinciding with Jung’s and Ostdiek’s gripping movements, allows for quite an evocative pay-off.

Stevey, who has graced stages alongside the likes of Carry Illinois, Alright Alright and Nathaniel Rateliff, among others, gives each word considerable, careful consideration. “We built it up high, but I let you down / Reaching for the clouds, but only blue around / Our hopes are free falling, oh what can I do? / We’re losing altitude,” he observes through the ivories on the hook, which was originally written over seven years ago. It’s evergreen nature strikes a brilliantly visceral chord, rearranged with his new-found wisdom as he peers through time as a genre-blurring truth-seeker. “Honestly, I’ve probably written 3 or 4 full-length ‘concept songs’ around the hook — topics revolving around physical abuse, drug use, feeling lost — but none of them ever felt right,” he writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email.

It wouldn’t be until years later that therapy sessions would trigger the song’s further potential. “I was involved in an unraveling romantic relationship that had been strung-along for far too long, and we were then seeking counseling. As I often do, one day I was writing to detox and release some stress, and the song lyrics just fell in my lap,” he says. “I knew the words I was writing belonged with the hook I had composed seven years prior. I thank the process of therapy for shaking loose some of the deeply rooted qualms I was clinging to, and ultimately, helping me finish this song.”

“altitude” is a cut from Stevey’s new EP, Above, out later this month.

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