Video Premiere: Careful, “It’s Funny”

Brooklyn-based, DIY-friendly musician Eric Lindley is the guy behind Careful, the indie-pop band that has The New York Times and NPR standing up and taking notice. His third album, the bad-relationship- -obsesesed Because I Am Always Talking is due August 21. Watch the video (complete with handy chord charts) for the song “It’s Funny” below.

“My process for writing music usually revolves around a tension between two ideas,” Lindley tells American Songwriter. “So, the premise for the song is that a couple goes to the beach after some cataclysmic event where maybe they’re the only people left on earth, but they find they no longer experience pleasure in the way they once did. My voice in the song is as the voice of one in the
couple who just yells pointlessly into the abyss about this — how disappointed and powerless and empty it feels.

“The video, then shoots for a kind of tongue-in-cheek tension between what’s clearly a sincere emotional moment—this intensity in the song—and the relatively flat, textual video. It tries to get at the contradiction between what can be reduced to a formula — the lyrics and chords — and the actual emotional result of the song, but hopefully also tries to take these intense feelings and bring them home—to apply them to the more domestic, familiar setting in the background.”