Exclusively from Amplify Music Mag. Katie Callahan’s music — a gorgeous mix of Americana grit and soaring indie-folk — will winnow its way into your soul. Her voice begs attention and her lyrics have a literary/cinematic depth and thought-provoking themes: this is music with a brain as well as a heart. She is releasing a stunning new video for “Low Tide,” one of the songs from her latest album, The Water Comes Back, and the song is an anthemic breath of fresh air, a reassurance that the cycles in nature will bring changes, a new day or a new season, and the return of the light of the sun. Accompanying the beautiful sounds is an evocative video that embraces and celebrates an artistic cycle of its own. Amplify Music Magazine has the exclusive premiere for the video today. We also sat down recently with Callahan to talk about the song and how the video came together with the help of family.
Please tell us about this song. What inspired you to write it and how did it come together?
“Low Tide” is technically the “title track” for my album, The Water Comes Back, in that the line “the water comes back” is from the chorus of this song. The idea began as I sat on the beach one summer and evolved over the next year to really encapsulate the feeling of limitation — by life circumstance, by mental health, by ability, by whatever — and accepting what capacity means at one particular time or another. In the moment of writing it, the song was about feeling both compelled to pursue music, but unsure of how to make it work with the life I wanted for my kids. I wasn’t sure how to keep going and was holding the confusing duo of being driven and discouraged both at once. “The water comes back” was what came to mind as I worried through that fallow season, the idea of trusting a tide to return or the winter to end or the sun to come up again. Trusting in the cycle and rhythm of things became the heartbeat of the whole album.
What was it like recording this song?
Incredible. I recorded at Gray Matters Studio in Nashville, and my producer, Matthew Odmark, had put together an amazing band, and getting to sing along as they started to form the anthemic sound the song ended up having was one of the moments I won’t forget. The strings were arranged by Matthew Nelson, and he and Avery Bright played on this track and a few others on the record. I’d recorded my parts in a whirlwind two weeks in Nashville at the start of 2021, so the strings were added after I went home. Hearing them for the first time on this track, which means so much to me, made it feel so rich and purposeful. It’s still hard for me to remember that all that sound originated with a voice note on my phone and my little guitar in my living room.
The video is fantastic. Who directed the clip?
Thank you so much! I conceptualized and directed the video — the pandemic has really made the phrase “necessity is the mother of invention” come to life around here. It’s the second video I’ve made with pretty rudimentary equipment, but I’ve enjoyed the process.
What story did you hope to tell with the video?
The story I wanted to tell with the video was one of a cycle: it starts with the painter, we move into her painting, then she IS the painting, and then she comes back to herself in the end. I guess my goal was to illustrate the frustration and the desperation of when it feels like the life you are trying to design is unreachable, isn’t going to plan, or has fallen through, but that underneath the design and control is a self worth saving.
Tell us a bit about the place(s) where you filmed. What made you want to film there?
I’m laughing, because we’re back into necessity and invention again. Most of this video is shot in my workspace on the third floor of our home. All of my music/recording/painting/crafting supplies are kept up there, and, as I work wide and often have many projects going at once, it’s a pretty crowded room. There’s this old bathroom somebody installed in the 1970s — chocolate brown giant tub, subway-tiled walls, even a matching brown toilet — and while it’s weird and very specific, I knew it could be a cool setting for the smaller, more intimate parts of the video story.
The beach scenes were shot by my sister, Chris, who was visiting some family at the beach in New Jersey (which is where “Low Tide” actually began). The girl in the painting and on the beach is my cousin, Lucy Callahan. I grew up by the Pacific Ocean and our visits back to the East Coast beaches always fascinated me; it felt like such a different experience. The ocean out there can be so brooding, more mysterious, more ominous, and still so familiar and comforting. I wanted that to be part of the story.
Any great stories to share from the shoot?
I knew I wanted beach scenes for this video, but I can’t leave the state with my kids in school without getting them tested and keeping them home as we wait for results. So when my sister was visiting family, I asked her to grab my cousin and film a few scenes for me. The funny thing was I had intended for HER to be in the video originally — we look enough alike that there would’ve been a visual cue that she was somehow still representative of the painter/singer character. But the video she sent was all of my cousin, and I liked it so much I decided it was a better idea and went with it.
