Love can make you do crazy things—and it can do crazy things to you. Soulful powerhouse Teddy Swims burns through these ideas with a new song and video called “Bed on Fire,” out today (April 23). If you’re gonna leave, leave me. Don’t say goodbye. Just set the bed on fire / Let it burn, he sings.
Videos by American Songwriter
“Bed on Fire,” co-written with Dallas Davidson, Adonijah Cartwright, Kyle Fishman, and producer Julilan Bunetta, centers around the kind of love that arrests your whole body. “Have you ever been so deeply in love with someone that you know they have the total power over you? Yet still you make a decision every day to trust them with that power because that’s what we do in love,” Swims says in a press statement. “[This song] comes from a place of genuine fear of loving someone so much that if they ever got up and decided to leave you at any moment they could crush your whole world. Fear lives in love.”
The music video, directed by Mischa Meyer and starring Leila George (from TNT’s Animal Kingdom), depicts the slow destruction of arresting love. George’s character is seen taking polaroids, wielding a baseball bat, and crying in the bathtub—all before her severe infatuation ignites the house, consuming all their memories with relentless flames. Meanwhile, Teddy Swims plants himself right in the center, and as the fire-storm grows, he lets it do what it does: consume everything.
You sleep with peace of mind you don’t worry / I’m wide awake I know it’s gonna hurt me, he sings. The least you could do is show a little mercy now.
Teddy Swims will perform the song during his upcoming appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on April 30. “Bed on Fire” samples a forthcoming EP, expected later this year. His debut graphic novel, titled Teddy Swims: Swimmy and the Valley of the Last Song, with Z2 Comics, is slated for a fall 2021 release.
Photo by Aaron Marsh
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