Video: Azure Ray, ‘Last Summer in Omaha’

S.Lo on October 27th, 2018

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With an arresting video for their new single, “Last Summer in Omaha,” dream-folk duo Azure Ray (Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink) mark the release of their EP “Waves” (on Taylor’s Flower Moon Records), their eighth full-length and first since reuniting a second time this January.

Born in 2001 in Athens, Georgia, out of Taylor’s mourning of her deceased boyfriend at the time (also a musician in the scene), the group helped define the somber Saddle Creek sound in Omaha, Nebraska, where Fink still resides. Taylor is now in Los Angeles, and before heading into a studio in Joshua Tree to co-produce the EP with Louis Schefano, the pair swapped demos remotely via email and Facetime.

Of the release (which includes a cover of fellow Athens, Georgia, stalwarts R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming” and a 2018 version of their own song, “Hold On For Love,” to commemorate that album’s 15th anniversary), Fink and Taylor share, “These songs are both a yearning and nostalgia for the Azure Ray of the past, and new perspectives on how and why we make music – with 18 years of love, life, and loss in between. It’s a record we’ve been aching to write – without even knowing it – just like the first one almost 2 decades ago.”

Their latest single, “Last Summer in Omaha,” has the weight of years in its bones and the critical self-questioning about the point of one’s existence after the youthful flame of blind ambition has burned through. Call it the afterburn, as Fink and Taylor sing, “All those years spent on the road / Descending notes don’t mean much anymore / A compass no longer shows you true north…/ The truth is I don’t know my own way anymore…/ But I’m too selfish and mean to give up on the dream / But what is the dream? / You tell me… I’m still lookin’ for a reason to wake up in love.” The context is watching friends start their families and seeing younger, hungrier artists pursuing their dreams, both of which don’t seem to sit right with one’s own waning but still flickering ambition.

The Nik Fackler-directed video featuring Kyan Doubet’s interpretive movement (choreographed by Kyan Doubet and Kat Fackler) shows the ugly messiness of going through this crisis of purpose after years of struggling to make it somewhere. Within this ugliness, Azure Ray sifts the beauty of feeling that self-doubt which eventually forces a new purpose, if there is one to be found “to wake up in love for.”

||| Watch: “Last Summer in Omaha”