Video: King Tuff, ‘Raindrop Blue’

Daiana Feuer on February 28th, 2018

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King Tuff reveals his tender side on “Raindrop Blue,” singing about “flowers blooming in my tears” as he’s falling in love, all the while keeping things heavy and fuzzed-out in the delivery of this soulful stomper. It’s another single from “The Other,” his new album for Sub Pop Records coming out April 13. As the Emmanuelle Pickett-directed video suggests, the song might actually be about a car. Or something deeper. It’s best to let Kyle Thomas explain the song’s origin:

“I wrote ‘The Other’ in October 2016. At the time it was a fictional story about losing myself and the quest to find the creative spirit again. I imagined myself driving around in a 1982 blue Subaru Brat, which has been my dream car ever since I was a little kid. I would see them driving around my hometown, Brattleboro, Vermont, and I thought the name Brat had something to do with the town itself. It always seemed like the unicorn of cars; you’d only catch a glimpse of one when you weren’t looking. So I was driving this car around in my song cuz you can do whatever you want inside a song.

“A year and a half later and the album was done. I sent it to my good friend Em so she could take a listen. She’s been in school studying dreams and alchemy, and we talked about the dark side of the moon, the flip side of the mirror, the unknowable Other and things in the lyrics which were oddly in line with her studies. She’s always had the most poetically surreal dreams as long as I’ve known her, full of symbols and strange beauty, like she’s tapped into some kinda psychic conduit. She was in Vermont but her dreams had been telling her to go to New Mexico. She needed transportation for when she got there, so she was hunting around on Craigslist to find some dusty old high-desert gem she could zoom around in. The first car that popped up: “1982 Blue Subaru Brat in Albuquerque.” The exact car from my song. She sent me the ad. I immediately booked a flight out there, bought the car and drove her back to L.A. in a blaze of romantic glory.

“The lyrics in the song had somehow come true. It felt like whatever this mysterious ‘Other’ was, it seemed like maybe it was on my side. Helping me along. As long as I had faith in it. So … Is ‘Raindrop Blue’ the Other? Or the Subaru? Probably both and probably neither. But one thing is for certain: I love to dance.”

||| Watch: “Raindrop Blue”