Video: Alaska Reid, ‘Back to This’

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Alaska Reid (Photo by Audrey Hall)

When Alaska Reid moved from her native Montana to Los Angeles a decade ago, she was a teenage folk singer with songs beyond her years. Since, Reid has dabbled in pop, gone full-on indie-rock (releasing an album by her band Alyeska) and circled back to the country-fied music that’s a good fit for her laid-back storytelling and confessionals.

Expect to hear a blend of the three styles — “mountain pop,” she calls it — when Reid releases her new album, “Disenchanter,” on July 14 via Luminelle Recordings. The album is the follow-up to “Big Bunny,” released in 2020, and finds her working with one of the producers on that album, A.G. Cook (Charli XCX, Jónsi, Caroline Polachek).

“Back to This” is the first single from “Disenchanter,” a dreamy songs bathed in atmospheric synths that seem to suggest movement through wide-open vistas. And indeed that is where the song got its inspiration — on a hike through the Yellowstone-adjacent Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in southwest Montana.

There, Reid came upon a forest service workers on a break. “It was late summer and they looked happy and dusty. It was like a painted reverie from a classical painting,” the songwriter says. “I fantasize about other people’s lives, other people’s professions, and writing is a way I can approximate what it must be like to be someone else.

“So this song is about stumbling upon a scene in someone else’s life and wanting to be a part of it, but it’s also about wondering if I ever seemed as cool or as worthy as those smokejumpers did. I also had this idea of looking back at a photo and wondering why, at the time, I did not feel like the version of myself looking back in the photo.”

Santiago Cendejas directs the video.

||| Watch: The video for “Back to This”

||| Previously: “Big Bunny,” “Oblivion,” “Medicine River”