Last summer, Tampa Bay songwriter Blake Daniels started to tease his new album, Break the Cycle before finally releasing it last fall. This week, he let local folk and Americana fans into the heart of the effort with a new video for “Some Blues,” which he and his band will celebrate during a free concert at Ella’s in Seminole Heights on Friday, April 15.
The nearly five-minute clip directed by Will Shanahan opens with Daniels in a muscle car, alone in the woods when a lone telephone booth appears through the mist. Daniels—dressed in plaid and dripping with the kind of Americana that made Mellencamp an incon—steps in, and the video cuts in between color and black & white video featuring a performance of the plaintive midtempo folk gem.
Daniels told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that much of Break the Cycle deals with interpersonal relationships, substance abuse, and emotional turmoil. He added that “Some Blues” runs all these themes through a prism by way of a semi-fictitious conversation, in which the narrator confesses their struggles with substance abuse and feelings of isolation with a loved one.
The video is set to go live on Friday, but there’s a preview online now (we’ll swap out the full video when it’s available).
“I tried to arrange the emotional flow of the album so that it’s kind of heightened at the beginning and end, with a lull in the middle that strips away the other instruments,” he said. “’Some Blues’ marks the center of that lull, with a sparse arrangement and confessional feel.
Shanahan told CL he was drawn to Daniels’ willingness to be vulnerable with his audience, citing the heavy subject matter on Break the Cycle, and particularly “Some Blues,” which he sees as Daniels’ response to his friends and loved ones who had the courage to speak up on his behalf.
“In those moments it’s nearly impossible to find the right words. If ‘Some Blues’ is Blake in the present, singing all the things he wished he said in those meaningful moments, then I wanted this video take us back to those moments in which he did not speak up, and capture the raw emotion and conflict he must have been feeling,” Shanahan—who shot the entire project on an LED stage in Tampa’s groundbreaking Vū virtual production studio—said.
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This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2022.
