Video: Harley Cortez, ‘The Hours’

Kevin Bronson on March 15th, 2017

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Harley Cortez in the video for "The Hours"

Last month Harley Cortez crooned his way back into our consciousness by releasing the infectious single “The Hours,” a meditation on how perspective changes our perception of time. (“When I was just a kid / the hours disappeared,” and ain’t that the truth.) The video Cortez and collaborator Steven A. Soria have made for the song toys with that notion too, placing the singer-songwriter in the foreground of a party in which the attendees — are they archetypes, or metaphors for various versions of ourselves? — are in their own world, only fleetingly interacting. The video, sleekly designed, features Sandi Denton, Shane Carpenter, Melissa Vexler, Tristan Thomas as “Storme” and Clark Dark.

The song, produced by Matthew Logan Vasquez of Delta Spirit, is from an album Cortez will release later this year. It represents a return to music for the man whose various endeavors (Red Cortez, Halfbluud, The Weather Underground, Just an Animal) saw him open for the likes of Morrissey, the Walkmen, Little Joy, Tallest Man on Earth, Stephen Malkmus and War on Drugs and work with producers such as Ethan Johns, Richard Swift and Raymond Richards. In the interim, he has written poetry, painted (with exhibitions in galleries in New York, L.A. and Tokyo) and traveled. And the album? “It’s beauty and strangeness,” he says.

Maybe not too unlike the party in this video.

||| Watch: “The Hours”