Video: Deep Sea Diver, ‘Impossible Weight’ (feat. Sharon Van Etten)

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Deep Sea Diver

“I tried so hard not to let you all down / It’s an impossible weight / so I’ll just let you down now,” Jessica Dobson sings on “Impossible Weight,” the title track to Deep Sea Diver’s third album, arriving Oct. 16 via ATO Records.

It is anything but a letdown. The song features Sharon Van Etten, who takes over one verse and sings backing vocals (plus, she cameos in the video). It features Dobson’s ripping guitar work, slicing through the ropes that tie us in emotional knots. And it features the frontwoman’s bold vocals, more immediate and confident than on Deep Sea Diver’s first two albums, exemplary of what she calls the “radical vulnerability” that fuels the album.

For the video, directed by Dobson, Peter Mansen and Tyler Kalberg, Dobson toted the light box that the Seattle quartet uses as a stage prop to “a myriad of untraditional places,” she says. “We wanted to create scenes of absolute beauty, of loneliness, of power — of the human spirit being fully alive, even in a time of sadness and uncertainty.”

Included in the locales was Seattle’s Neptune Theatre. “I chose the Neptune as the final shot because that is the venue in which I saw Sharon Van Etten play at the night before we recorded the song,” Dobson says. “I’ve been a huge fan or hers for quite some time and I was deeply moved and inspired by that show. The next day, I literally said out loud as we were recording, ‘I wonder if Sharon would ever sing on this?’ Having never met her, it was definitely a pipe dream question that somehow ended up working out and I’m eternally grateful for it. She brought so much to this song and brought it alive even more.”

||| Watch: The video for “Impossible Weight”

||| Previously: “Lights Out,” “Stop Pretending,” Live at the Bootleg, live at the Teragram, “Secrets,” “One by One,” “NWO” “You Go Running”