"Overture" (The Auxiliary song) – Queen City Sounds and Art

The vocal processing and overall production to “Overture,” the latest single from The Auxiliary aka Russell Howard, enhances the impression of waking up through one’s own fog into awareness. Paired with a music video in which the character in the song converses with a figure that is at times a mannequin and other times an unresponsive human the muted aspects of the vocals feel gentle like the flickers of intuition that make suspicions or hunches flow into emotional certainties when one’s cognition keys into aspects of the world around you and truths you had ignored or put aside come into focus. There is a low key horror or thriller film aspect to the music video where the horror might be coming into the understanding that you’re with someone that isn’t really paying attention to your needs even as you try to anticipate theirs and do things for them any normal person would in any normal loving relationship. At the end of the video there is a video projector casting the image of the beloved on the wall like the projection of one’s own fantasy of that person as the human you want them to be but aren’t. Although a blunt metaphor it speaks well to the ways we allow ourselves to get into situations that don’t suit us because we insist they are something we want instead of what they are even when all along we’ve known it’s not true but we so desperately want to believe something that fulfills our heart’s desire that we will go along with that fantasy until enough is triggered in our minds that the truth hits hard. The way Howard structured and executed the song from early, soft musical touches to more sonically saturated passages parallels perfectly the cinematic depiction of the process of being willing to feel the pain of breaking free of limiting fantasies and walking toward a life we would want instead of the one we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we have. Watch the video for “Overture” on YouTube and connect with The Auxiliary at the links below.