Alexz Johnson premieres “Ruthless Love” online — SubstreamMagazine.com
This is a great article about “Ruthless Love” the song, video, and Alexz’s plans for the future.
Indie artist Alexz Johnson released her self-produced music video for her song “Ruthless Love” online today. This past Saturday, Johnson threw an event to share the video with a sold out crowd at the Golden Box in Los Angeles.
The Vancouver native premiered her music video on Vevo this afternoon. You can watch “Ruthless Love” below:
“Ruthless Love” was directed by Montana Mann, who is known for her work in commercials and short films. She is the daughter of director Farhad Mann, who worked with Johnson on “Devil’s Diary” in 2006 and “The Listener” in 2011. Mann;s father would tell Johnson, “You should really meet my daughter, Montana. You guys would get along great and you should work together on sometime,” so when the vision for the music video came to Johnson, she reached out to Mann.
Fans can look forward to another Mann and Johnson collaboration in the near future according to the singer.
If “Instant Star” fans think they see a familiar face, they won’t be wrong. Laura Vandervoort was the woman in the black makeup mask in the video. Johnson had a dream one night of Vandervoort being in her video, so the singer called her the next day and their schedules matched up and a T.V. sisterhood was reunited.
Johnson told the inspiration behind the song: “Probably the most intense feeling we feel in this life is love. We find ways of destroying it, sabotaging it, and damaging it and loving it, breathing it, and creating life with it. I think it’s so powerful. So the song came about [out of] the simplicity of how powerful love is and how ruthless we are within it.”
The video itself is a, “very artistic portrayal done in a studio about all the inter-motions that happen with people, and in the video, all the universal emotions inside of a woman. I hope that everybody can relate to it in some way.
“I really wanted to tap into the freedom that we’re born with, the freedom that we feel we lose, and the fear that we’ve bound our spirits. There is a sadness to the video, but also an energy to it.
“I want people to question what they’re watching and I want [them] to take out of [the video] what they want to take out of it and pull their own feelings from it based on their experiences. I didn’t want to be too specific, I wanted to set a tone and a feel based on the images that they’re watching. I hope I do that.”
Johnson predicts that the video cause an intense emotional reaction from the audience based on what she’s seen from people who have already seen the video. While editing the first version of the music video, Johnson’s eyes began to water and asked herself if it’s “weird that I’m crying watching this and is it weird that my friends that had seen it were getting emotional?”
The singer is taking a short break before touring again and recording another album, not to say that she won’t be working on music in the mean time. “I’m going to be taking a seat back. I’ve been writing a lot of music lately and I need to gage what I want to do next. I’m going to be thinking about what’s next for me. What do I want to do?
“I’m going to feel and see what I want to do, really listen to myself. Sometimes things can get so busy it’s like, ‘What am I doing? Where am I?’ I think it’s really important to put something up you really believe in and let that sit and breathe for a bit and then quiet with myself and think about what I want to do.”
She is actually playing the University of Minnesota at the end of October, but then that’s it until she gets some much needed family time. Information about the show can be found here.
So what’s next for Johnson? ” I’m working on a project with an artist in L.A., something I really believe in that’s already finished, so I’m going to figuring out when I’m going to be releasing that.”
And South American fans be on the look out: “I do want to tour; I’d love to tour South America. I have a plan on doing that. I’m getting the wheels in motion to make that happen in early 2016.”
