Video: Weyes Blood, ‘Used To Be’

Daiana Feuer on November 7th, 2016

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Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering and director Laura-Lynn Petrick took a Super 8mm camera to the Salton Sea and Cabazon Dinosaurs to film the video for “Used To Be,” the latest single from her Mexican Summer-released album, “Front Row Seat To Earth.” Beyond telling her own story, the album is a love song to our mistreated, estranged planet. Wearing that electric blue suit, her uniform of the moment, Mering traverses the deteriorating tourist destinations that have been warped over time from their original glory. The Cabazon Dinosaurs have a history stretching back to the 1960s, when Knotts Berry Farm artist Claude K. Bell built Dinny the brontosaurus out of spare materials from the newly constructed I-10 freeway. There used to be a slide in her tail. Mr. Rex came along in the 1980s, and you can climb all the way up to his mouth, as Mering demonstrates, sticking her arms out from between his teeth. The current owners turned the dinosaurs into a creationist museum, but people still go in and pay the fee to mock the theory that Adam and Eve and the dinosaurs once roamed the earth together. It’s a twisted pleasure. Then we’re off to the Salton Sea, a sinking apocalyptic graveyard for dead fish and broken homes, which once was a resort destination. Built with good intentions but doomed by its own potential, the setting underlines her wistful melody.

||| Watch: “Used To Be”