The Shins have released a new poetic video for their song ‘It’s Only Life’, which features a cute little boy and his even cuter dog walking in the forest, inside his own fairy-tale world – he has attached woody deer antlers on his red helmet – while James Mercer is dragged by terrifying black monsters through the song.
Now you can make what you want with that scenario, the little boy could be a young Mercer finding fun and beauty everywhere he goes, incarnating childhood innocence as he goes through what is described as ‘an apocalyptic suburbia’, but also watching his future, that is, grown-up Mercer taken away by the monsters of depression? Of adult life? Who have destroyed any beauty and any fireworks.
The lyrics of the song are cryptic as usual for Mercer, but there is the ‘rabbit hole’ and ‘I never drank your potion’ twisting the song into a sort of Lewis Caroll fairy tale, and a definitive connection to childhood, there are all kinds of reference to depression such as ‘I've been down the very road you're walking now/It doesn't have to be so dark and lonesome’, and even an allusion to ‘the future’s calling’, so I guess this could work.
This video was directed by Hiro Murai, and by the way, I have never been able to identify what kind of creature was on the cover of the album ‘Port of Morrow’, the monsters could look like it, but you also sort of see the cover in the last images, when the little boy climbs on a roof wearing his antler-helmet.