Video: Harley Cortez, ‘Running With the Hunted’

Kevin Bronson on August 24th, 2018

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With his new single “Running With the Hunted,” singer-songwriter and visual artist Harley Cortez pays tribute to his friend, the late songwriter-producer-musical svengali Richard Swift. The song, out this week with the B-side “Say It Twice” (which features Swift), is available on Bandcamp, with all proceeds going to the Richard Swift Memorial Fund, benefiting the family of the artist who died in July at age 41.

“I was looking to do something with the idea of how our dearest late friend Richard Swift would have thought to produce the song — I even sent it to him last year when it was being mixed,” Cortez says of the tune, which also appears on his new album “Tangier.” “It’s why it is the song on my album that sounds most like any of my previous projects, namely Just an Animal’s ‘Lonely Hunter’ (which Swift produced).”

Both the song and the video have many artistic touchstones. Notably, the title derives from the Charles Bukowski anthology “Run With the Hunted.” The Luis Bunwel-directed video — starring local legend Vj Kesh, along with Lilli Passero and Jimi Cabeza de Vaca — is a slice of surrealist splendor, inspired, he says, by “the work of Chagall and Matisse and movies by Jean Cocteau where dancers play the pivotal role of emotions.” Here, he adds, it’s the ages-old “battle between heart and mind, passion and logic.”

It makes for a transcendent four minutes.

||| Watch: The video for “Running With the Hunted”