Video premiere: Harley Cortez, ‘Tangier’

Kevin Bronson on June 13th, 2018

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Harley Cortez has a long musical resumé including soul-searching solo material and work in Just an Animal, Red Cortez and the Weather Underground. His music endeavors have always shared creative space with his work as a poet and as a visual artist (Cortez recently had a solo show in Tokyo). Indeed, the title track to his concept album “Tangier” began as a painting. “‘Tangier’ is not simply about a place or a person, it’s about a feeling and a moment — and attempting to capture that required a new approach to music,” he says. “Somewhere along the line I began to marry the approach of the two occupations.”

Tristan Scott Thomas’ video for the song portrays Cortez in an existential morass. “It’s about a person struggling with identity, or inner turmoil perhaps, and looking for some sort of sanctity — if not a place, then a peace of mind,” the songwriter explains. “Tangier has always attracted outliers (Burroughs, Matisse, Paul Bowles) and was a place where they could be accepted. While that place of yesteryear, like anything else, has come and gone, it still exists as a representation of that — a metaphor for something somewhere we all yearn to feel.

“A mix of anonymity and belonging, as contrarian as those two sometimes can be.”

“Tangier,” the album, will be out on June 29.

||| Watch: The video for “Tangier”