This video is a gift to my free subscribers and a thank you to the artists who inspire me to keep making art.
I came across a Jean Cocteau quote a few months ago that’s been flirting with me ever since:
“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”
Jean Cocteau
This video is an ode to Cocteau and to the many artists who’ve given me the opportunity over the last few months to concern myself with what Cocteau is talking about, with something other than life or death.
Dance, music, drugs conscious-altering substances, friends, sex, fellow artists1—without these things in my life, I wouldn’t make any art at all because I’d be too apathetic.
So thank you to the artists of the world for making me feel alive
and for reminding me that’s there’s so much more to existence than being worried about the fact that yes, in fact, we are all going to die. (Isn’t it amazing how even reading those words does something to our stomachs? The most obvious truth of existence and I hesitate to even write the phrase).
The song is called “The Train” (recorded in Bb major)
and the video combines scenes of night-life in Paris, and tranquillity in the Italian countryside, because these were recents moments when I felt, to Cocteau’s point, that I was able to “get off the train while it’s moving.”
I have written lyrics for this song as well, but I’m still tinkering with them, and only paying subscribers will be able to hear me sing them.
As the above video suggests, it’s essential to support living artists if we want them to keep making the art that makes us tick; and while it remains extremely uncomfortable for me to suggest that my work might be valuable enough for a few people to pay for it, such is the nature of being an artist in the 21st century. If I could make art for free for a living, I would, but alas, I have multiple jobs, and it’s only thanks to the 60+ paying subscribers on this space that I’m able to devote extra time to videos like this.
But Sundays are for piano.
Enjoy,
Samuél
PS
The best way to experience this 5-minute video is on a computer screen with a decent speaker—or better yet, with a pair of headphones. I didn’t make this video to be watched or listened to via cell phone, even if I did film everything via my phone (I think that’s called a paradox). But please, please allow yourself the 5 minutes to listen and watch to “Life, Lately (Take 1),” and maybe, just maybe, step off the train for a few seconds.
My good friend, the talented singer-songwriter
, features in this video. His most recent album “Soft Power” is a melodic meditation, and his Substack is a treasure-trove of his songwriting process:
life, lately