"Can We Go Back" Single + Music Video OUT NOW!
Crissi Cochrane
It is my great pride and joy to finally announce that my pandemic-inspired single, “Can We Go Back”, is now available on all major streaming platforms, and the music video is officially out now on YouTube! I’m excited to share with you some more about the way I approached writing this song, and how happy I am that I was able to create a music video at home with my husband as the director.
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This song began as a collaboration between my husband Mike (also known as Soul Brother Mike), and some of the other artists on the music label that we co-founded at the start of this year, the Soul City Music Co-op. Mike created the bed track of the song, Dane Roberts added guitars, and Austin Di Pietro added horns. Then, Mike approached me to write the top-line (the lyrics and melody) of the song. I had never done any top-line writing before, but have always wanted to try - to take a complete track and carve out a space for vocal melodies, while aligning my subject matter with the already established feeling of the song.
It was a fun challenge, and my first ever experience doing any kind of co-writing. I’ve always been too afraid to co-write, because it typically happens while you’re all in the same room together, and I’m terrified that my mind will go blank, or that my ideas will be terrible, or that my suggestions will be rejected, and then, how hard would it be, to forge on despite all that awkwardness? But because we all contributed our parts separately, we got to refine our ideas first, and then bring them to the group.
It was April when I was writing the lyrics, and at that time, it was predicted that the pandemic would last at least another 6-12 months. I knew that this song would be coming out in the summer, when we'd all be feeling exhausted and worn-down by pandemic life - at the best, missing out on family gatherings, vacations, festivals, parties, all those social outings that make the summer so magical, and at the worst, being sick or losing someone we love... I knew that I didn’t have to talk about the pandemic in the song, but I wanted to - because this is something that everyone around the world is experiencing, all together, at the same time. As a songwriter, at least some part of me is always considering the universal perspective, to make something that resonates with as many people as possible, fitting into the background of so many lives - and how rare (thankfully) is this pandemic, this acute experience that all of us will remember, and god willing, tell our children and grand-children about? I think that we need art to tell our stories, and I wanted to contribute something that speaks to what it was like to be alive in this time. The arrangement had such a mellow, soulful feeling, and I felt it would be the perfect backdrop to explore this moment in human history, and offer some sympathy for all our collective exhaustion.
In keeping with my attempt to make this song resonate, I decided to make it not explicitly about the pandemic - no mentions of vaccines, masks, testing, and so on (how on earth would I make those things poetic in the first place?) - but to make it on the surface about a general longing for an earlier, simpler time. As a person in my 30s, I’m in a part of my life where I have the most stress and responsibility, so I definitely feel this wistfulness for more carefree days. I often feel nostalgic for the magic of my childhood, and I am constantly trying to recreate that for my own daughter, happily recalling those easy chapters of my life.
The only thing that really roots this song in the pandemic are the bridge lyrics - “Am I asking too much if I can’t live without a human touch?” I was thinking about all the little everyday interactions we used to have with the hands of others - taking change from a cashier at the check-out, bring a mug of tea to a visitor, all the hugs I so freely gave at my shows.
I’m not sure what sparked it, but this summer, Mike developed a passion for videography, and made me his guinea pig. Our official music video for “Can We Go Back” was Mike’s first experience as a cameraman, director, and editor, and he knocked it out of the park, easily advancing into a really professional tier in quality. We filmed it in three days at the end of July, using some really basic equipment, including a Canon t5i that I bought Mike for Christmas a few years ago (with some new and borrowed lenses), and actually filming a few shots on iPhone, too. We filmed around home and in a few isolated spots downtown - this is the first time that Windsor has featured so prominently in one of my videos. Now that we’re getting more self-sufficient in videography, I expect we’ll be exploring a lot more of Windsor in our videos going forward, since there are so many great locations around the city that we’d like to showcase.
We began our first “day” of shooting at night, after putting Adeila to bed. Mike pushed aside all the living room furniture, laid out a selection of our vinyl records on the floor (you can see Heirloom there too!), and suspended the camera above, on the stands that we use for the backdrop curtain in our live-streams. The records were all still in the sleeves, so I was a bit nervous about laying on them and hoping they didn’t break..! I was also a bit nervous about the possibility of the camera falling on my face, and spent the first few minutes of the shoot with my hands up just in case, but it was really well-secured. The rotating shots were actually filmed on the iPhone in an inexpensive gimble.
The next day of shooting, we brought Adeila to her Nana’s for the morning, and we did all of our backyard filming, on the steps that I painted rainbow colours at the start of the pandemic, trying to inject some cheerfulness into a space that I knew we’d be using a lot this summer. The intro shot of the video, descending out of the oak tree, looks as if it was done with a drone, but it was just an iPhone on a gimble again, plus a long extension - almost like a broom handle with an iPhone on the end of it.
On our third and final day of shooting, we were “running and gunning” downtown - we’d hop out at a location, quickly set up and film for 10-15 minutes at most, and then we were back in the car, headed to a different spot, creating a storyline heading towards the river. We visited an empty lot at the corner of Dougall and University, a little parkette at the corner of Cameron and Riverside, the underpass at the riverfront, and one of my favourite benches high up on a hill by the river. I’m exploring deserted spaces, trying to get a feel for whether or not it’s safe. At the end, I’m wearing my mask at the river - suggesting that no, I don’t feel safe, and I can’t go back just yet.
One really serendipitous aspect of the video is the journal that I’m reading on the back steps. Mike had wanted me to have a book in the shot, any kind of book. That morning, the closest, nicest book was my house journal, which I keep in our dish cabinet, and write in once a season, detailing what’s happening in our lives and what changes we’ve made to the house and how we use it. (It’s a hundred-year-old house, and I feel like its stories also need to be told.) So, when director Mike asked me to open the book and turn the pages, I opened my journal at the latest entry, and started to leaf backwards - literally reading back to the way that it used to be.
In our 20s, Mike and I really struggled with financing our recordings. It took many years for us to build up our own studio and expertise, and now we’re in a place where we can create high-quality recordings ourselves, and cut away that enormous expense in being an artist. We’ve always had the same struggle with videography, when the cost of a music video averages between $1000 and $20,000 and doesn’t actually generate any income on its own. This is why my music video catalogue is very small. But I’m really excited that, with this first video, we are taking the reins in yet another aspect of our livelihood, and taking another step towards being even more self-sufficient as independent artists. I hope this means there are lots more music videos to come!