Premiere: Underlined Passages captures a fleeting moment in ‘brkn’ video

Loss scatters like falling stars throughout our lives. And the best thing we can do is accept things as they truly are. Songwriter Michael Nestor collects up the shiny broken remnants with his band Underlined Passages‘ song “brkn,” off their wistfully decorated Landfill Indie. Drums and guitars collide, transmitting a radiantly moody by-product that feels earnest as it shakes loose discarded parts that serve as points of renewal.

“Hope is all around you,” Nestor reaffirms with himself. When the dust and debris finally settle at his feet, he picks a place on the horizon and begins the slow journey to a revitalized space. “brkn” bridges the gap between brokenness and revival and “captures a snapshot of me grappling with loss—emotional, relational, maybe even spiritual—and finding slivers of redemption in the aftermath,” Nestor tells B-Sides & Badlads. “I wanted it to be both raw and hopeful. If there’s one takeaway I hope listeners feel, it’s that you can acknowledge every broken piece of yourself and still hold onto the idea that someday, you’ll form something whole again—even if it ends up looking different than you imagined.”

The average person feels greater loss as time ticks away, as hairs grey and skin grows wrinkled, and there’s beauty in that. “We often stress out at that last part – ‘life looking different than what we imagined.’ That is especially the case when you are in middle-aged adulthood, as I am,” he continues. “But part of what ‘brkn’ is communicating is that the meaning is in the dissonance, and the more you can be OK with being broken, and be OK with the disjointed space between expectations and reality, the more at peace you will be with how things are turning out, even if you did not imagine them that way.”

The “brkn” visual, premiering today, arrives as a time capsule. Produced by the talented Rick Barnwell, the staged clip bottles up the beauty of live performance, a moment in time that you can’t get back. Within three minutes, you feel the song’s lyrics pulse in your eardrums and lyrics rise like steam into the ether. Even though you can watch the video over and over again, there’s nothing quite like that very first time.

Underlined Passages’ Landfill Indie is out now on all digital platforms.

Watch “brkn” below.

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