Celebrated songwriter Jordan Klassen is unveiling the new video for “Niko” from his latest LP, Glossolalia. Directed by Lester Lyons-Hookham, Klassen says when “we first started talking about a video for ‘Niko’, we wanted to engage with themes of isolation and intrigue. The song is about trying to convince a friend who is becoming conspiratorial to turn from their ways so we wanted to approach the video from the perspective of the conspiracy theorist, the Lone Ranger. I think people get turned on to conspiracy theories because it’s hard to accept that life is maybe just boring a lot of the time. We want to be people of intrigue, having an inside scoop on something important. The character in the video represents that self-image.”
“‘Niko’ is about observing a friend slip into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories - and for me, the concept of conspiracy theories is an entirely western societal affliction,” says Lyons-Hookham.
“With the video, I thought it would be fun to build this anonymous character that was a walking metaphor of problematic 19th and 20th century western civilization.The video frames him in a series of poetic shots of an eerie, empty world. Tightly blocked tableaus and landscapes feature the character as he moves about - somewhat detached and perplexed - searching for hidden truths within the natural world; attempting to make connections and identify schemes.”
MORE ABOUT GLOSSOLALIA
Glossolalia is classic and essential Jordan Klassen: ethereal, dreamy, mystical, and reminiscent of times gone by and the folk singers of yore. This album is a lyrical essay, with each song like a chapter in a personal journal. ‘Glossolalia’ itself is the phenomenon of (apparently) speaking in an unknown language, more commonly called ‘speaking in tongues’.
The album is almost elegiac, with its pervasive sense of something that has been lost to the past. Perhaps it was inevitable that Klassen would produce this record now, reflecting on the promise we have all felt of something better just on the horizon, that has since been erased by life in a pandemic that has entered its third year. In Klassen’s own words on this record, “Everything is about longing - longing for change but trying to be realistic about change as well.”
Record opener “Lotusland” is an ode to Klassen’s hometown of Vancouver, but specifically, the Vancouver of yesteryears, before the city grew to become an overinflated and vastly different landscape of what it used to be; a former shell of itself, where the weight of the cost of living seemingly crushes its oldest inhabitants. As friends move away, the singer asks the city to convince him to stay, and laments what ‘West Coast living’ could have meant. Similarly, Klassen stays in that uncomfortable place of yearning in “Hard On Myself”. The song deals with the choice to take the road through life that represents the “third way”, in a world that is polarized and binary. This is a conscious movement away from religious rigidity, absolute certainty, and toxic black and white thinking. But the other road, “the road less traveled”, to quote Robert Frost, is one of strangeness and deconstruction, and there is a sadness in this choice as well. In
a contemporary take on a poetic classic, Klassen sings: “There are two roads where I’m standing, and each one has called itself good. But there’s light in the sky and I’ve got some supplies; I just might make my way through the woods.” Frost ruminated, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
The back half of Glossolalia flips from an observational standpoint, to a more personal, introspective one. “Brothers In Arms” is a personal reflection on the need for reconciliation, with painful rifts in society and within families and friends’ groups, heightened by vaccine anxiety, isolation, restrictions, quarantine, and lockdowns. We are reminded that we are still “Living our days as brothers in arms”, regardless of what goes on around us in a pandemic world. It is a mature, reserved commentary from Klassen that none of us has the residue of innocence anymore: “Oh you aren’t some little boy who needs the world explained”. “Pangea” draws parallels between Klassen’s personal love of history and a past when the world was truly one in a great continental mass. The artist, who can be seen as a kind of Renaissance man himself, takes up the defense of great movements and thoughts of the past, and declares, “I’m caught up in stories from before”.
PERFORMANCE DATES
Jul 9 - Vancouver, BC - Khatsalano Street Fest
Jul 15 - Victoria, BC - Capitol Ballroom
Tickets available here : http://www.jordanklassenmusic.com/live
