Lena Fayre

Lena Fayre, sixteen-year-old singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles, has just released an accompanying music video for her highly acclaimed debut single, “Belong To You.” The heart-rending video plays more like a short film than a typical music video, or perhaps more like one of the million-dollar, worldwide events that the MTV video debuts of the mid-1990’s were.

Fayre's “Belong To You” video is rendered in stunning black and white, with staggering contrasts of bright, white light and pitch-dark shadows, and with gradations of silver (rather than dull gray) in between. It tells the story of a young ill-fated, beautiful couple torn apart as victims of bad choices. Scenes of amorous carousing spliced between romantic visions of a date on the Santa Monica pier work as foils to remarkably gorgeous shots of doom and violence: windows exploding, curtains whipping in the wind; silhouettes of lover and beloved rolling slowly in their car as shattered glass arcs inward like angular drops of water; Fayre half-striding, half-gliding phantasmically through torrential rain as parking meters melt in her wake. The video closes on a tastefully treated plot twist (however melancholy and appropriately tragic) and with the too-familiar sounds of Los Angeles sirens speeding on their way to the site of the disaster. However, of all the shots, the image of Fayre's face with an ever-so-slightly quizzical expression with oncoming headlights shining upon her eerily white skin, is one that will stay with the viewer long afterward.

Directed by award-winning 23-year-old music video director from Cal. State Univ. Long Beach, Leah McKissock and produced by Adam Blake Carver, the video is a work of awe-inspiring beauty and grief, exactly parallel to Fayre's song, itself. McKissock's direction is somehow delicate and sledgehammer-blunt at once, her shots direct and uncluttered. Each of her subjects are as plain to the eye as a still-life painting, yet with a subtlety of emotion that lets deep undercurrents of impending regret and woe climb under the skin, where they build and push like dammed water until the deeply tragic closing scene.

Lensed by female cinematographer Polly Morgan, named the “rising star” of AFI’s competitive program and former assistant to world-renowned DP Wally Phister (The Dark Knight and Inception), Morgan modernizes every black and white frame with subtle film noir references and carefully placed pools of light. Her work is raw, yet simultaneously polished, making “Belong To You” a true work of art.

Fayre's single, “Belong To You,” is sure to send ripples of excitement throughout the pop music subculture (and thence onward through the mainstream, no doubt) and to have an early peek at such a marvelous music video produced by such young blood is a rare, rare treat for music fans. Be the first to update your status with a link to Lena Fayre's “Belong To You” video, and there's a good chance you'll be earning music-geek finder's points for months to come.

-Sean McCauley