I bet you’re reading this on your phone. There’s a very good chance you are – a 68% chance, in fact. No judgement, really. We all do it. We get lost in our phones for hours at a time. We use them for work, for socializing, for mindlessly maintaining tiny digital farms. “Home,” the latest music video from Devarrow, puts that particular addiction on the same level as popping pills, and just as capable of filtering your reality.
Devarrow’s Graham Ereaux explains that much like his previous single, “Heart Attack,” “Home” is similarly about our place in the modern world, the incongruity of humans and the environment we’ve created, and our relationship with phones, those devious little enablers.
“I find it so hard to find balance in phone use, and often it feels like an unhealthy addiction to me,” says Ereaux. “I see this in myself and those around me. It discourages me how easily it is to slip into phone holes – one minute I’ll be walking down the street having a thought, and then I’ll pick up my phone and suddenly be three blocks further down the road. Where did my mind go and how could I let myself loose touch with the world around me so easily? It deeply scares me how easily a phone can be like a drug, and I think this will be a defining issue for us millennials.”
“Home” treats the phone exactly as one would a drug. The song includes lines like “I don’t know how I’m going to get off the pills” and “Then like a drug my phone does ring,” while the video sees the world warp around us.
Cellular stimulus wasn’t just the inspiration for the song’s lyrics, it also tied heavily into the production itself, with Ereaux going for a lo-fi vibe (which you probably didn’t even notice because I bet you were watching the video on a phone in the first place!). The song and video turn wonderfully meta as medium and message fold in on themselves, creating the masterpiece Marshall McLuhan only dreamed of.
“Some of the instruments on ‘Home’ – and a lot the rest of the record – were recorded on my iPhone (and Mac too),” says Ereaux. “I like the scratchy, compressed, raw quality of the iPhones mic, and I felt the tone of it helped reflect the anxieties I felt in making the record and how I feel about technology. Honestly, I think all those stylistic iPhone and Mac recordings really helped define the sound of this record.
“When it came time to making the music video, I took a similar approach. I wanted to make the video in a way that reflected the way we generally consume media. I watch a hundred videos sent to me by friends, for every one hi-fi video I watch on YouTube.
“Why not make a video that’s made the same way I make videos for my friends? And the content of the video is supposed to reflect that drug-like addiction to our phones. No better way to describe that then actually eating a phone itself. Phones are anxiety inducing. The irony, is that although using my phone was indispensable to the tone of this record, I always feel happier when my phone is off.”
So now the question is: are we expected to put our phones down at a Devarrow concert, or is watching through a tiny glowing screen now the most authentic version of the experience?
Tour Dates:
09.18-21.19 – Hamburg, DE @ Reeperbahn Festival 2019
10.24.19 – Fredericton @ The Capital Complex
10.25.19 – Saint John @ Peppers Pub
10.26.19 – Moncton @ Tide & Boar
11.02.19 – Quebec City @ Imperial de Quebec *
11.04.19 – Halifax @ The Marquee Ballroom *
* w/ The Dead South