| Louise Patricia Crane launches the second video from her forthcoming album, ’Deep Blue‘ with the stunning clip for “Ophelia” which is also released as a single across all streaming platforms today. |
Produced by Full Moon Media; the production company responsible for the award-winning video of Crane’s debut single “Deity”, “Ophelia” takes a darker turn than it’s predecessor, in keeping with the tragic narrative of the Shakespearean character on which the lyric is based. Filmed entirely at night across a full week in the bleak cold of early February 2020 “Ophelia’ takes its visual lead from Sir John Everett Millais’ painting of the same name.
“For years I’ve been fascinated by Millais’ rendering of Ophelia“, elaborates Louise, “I find the Pre-Raphaelites so alluring with their depictions of classic scenes from literature and legends, married with lush verdant scenery. When I was writing in my notebook for this album I became fixated on old flower books, engravings, how flowers once carried meaning… as in “The Language of Flowers”“. “The botanical obsession is clear throughout my writing on the album! A few years ago, I’d just moved to Cambridge and I took a day to go around the London art galleries with a friend. To finally see Millais’ Ophelia in the flesh for the first time was really quite breath-taking. The sadness in her glassy eyes, the placement of the flowers around her. The delicate lace of her dress. This balance of the romantic and the macabre is really alluring to me. When writing for this song I explored the meaning behind the flowers that surround Millais’ Ophelia. The forget-me-nots stood out, to me they were a key feature of this piece. They carry their meaning in the name”. “My concept for the video was to mix the romantic macabre I associate with the painting, with a ’70s horror aesthetic. It is the “Moon” to Deity’s “Sun”. A sister video to illustrate the themes across both sides of the ‘Deep Blue’ album and Full Moon Media helped me realise this perfectly“.
| Starting life as a melancholy instrumental piece by co-writer Stephen Carey and emailed over to Louise as a potential idea for inclusion on the ‘Deep Blue’ album, the music served as a catalyst to pull the disparate lyrical notes and embryonic concepts floating around the pages of Crane’s notebook together into one place, “I’d wanted a ‘second side of Hounds of Love’ feel, sort of like “Hello Earth”, and when Stephen composed this amazing piece of music and sent it to me, I immediately knew this was “Ophelia” before pen even touched paper”. “Even the instrumental break was the sound of her succumbing, drowning; the music was almost following her story before the lyrics were finally written”. For the final flourish, Louise was able to call on the talents of Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull to add his signature flute to the piece, “I wrote both “Snake Oil” and “Ophelia” on the same afternoon, recorded the multi-tracked vocals here at home the next morning and sent them both to Ian for his input”. “He was a dream to work with on this, he asked me for my lyrics, so he could get a feel for the emotions I was going for, and I find that his haunting flute on this song really does take it somewhere otherworldly”. |
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| Existing in a dreamlike headspace that embraces classic psychedelia, ethereal visions, romantic mythos and rapturous drama, Louise Patricia Crane‘s debut album is a twilit collection of uncommon class and chutzpah – emotional and fantastical realms writ large in a musical landscape where nothing is off limits, possessed of a rare magick to fire the imagination. The genesis of this album arrived when Louise began working in earnest with Stephen Carey, who she had first met when singing with The Eden House, and it became apparent that many of the musical ideas she had nurtured independently for years might have finally found a suitable creative foil. She was so thrilled by their early experiments together that she relocated from her native Belfast to rural Cambridgeshire to work on the record. “Working with him has been a wonderful experience” says Louise, “I felt respected and in control of the process. He‘s also just a very talented musician who instils his playing with a lot of emotion and – dare I say it – femininity, which was so key for me and for this album. Stephen and I also share a lot of the same reverence for certain artists and aesthetics, namely Kate Bush‘s ‘Hounds Of Love’, which was my loose template for producing a record which can at one point touch on pop overtones, then the next moment take you somewhere much darker – proggy, yet still dreamy throughout”. With an intuitive rhythm section of Eden House drummer Simon Rippin and bassist Steve Gibbons on board, a resolutely genre-free and unconventional sound began to evolve amidst a myriad of influences – from the rich and celestial sonics of classic Cocteau Twins to the timeless melodies of ’White Album‘-era Beatles and the maverick spark and earthy passions of early Tori Amos, not to mention non-musical inspiration such as the classic cult film Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders and the literary fiction of Angela Carter. It was to take on still new frontiers when King Crimson member Jakko Jakszyk came on board, contributing guitar tracks and backing vocals. “I can’t put in to words what it meant to have the singer and guitarist from King Crimson – who I’ve been unashamed about declaring as my favourite band – express a keen interest in my music”, says Louise. Moreover, legendary artist Jim Fitzpatrick, famed for his work on Thin Lizzy‘s ’Jailbreak‘ amongst many others, was on hand to work on the album‘s sleeve. Yet these contributions, prestigious though they may be, only serve to accentuate an extremely well-defined and potent vision all Louise‘s own. “My main overall theme on this album, is certainly escapism, seduction, dreaming – escaping the corporeal realm and going somewhere otherworldly that stimulates and tantalises” she notes. “I‘m a total dreamer and art – for me – has always been about leaving this place and being taken away to somewhere more appealing to the senses”. |
