Video: Active Child, ‘All Eyes on You’

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Active Child (Photo by Riccardo T. Castano)

It’s been four years since Pat Grossi released his second album as Active Child, and more than nine years since he first started sending chills up spines with his harp-propelled electronic music accompanied by the voice he once wielded in the Philadelphia Boys Choir.

Since 2015’s “Mercy,” his second album for Vagrant Records, Active Child has released but one song, “Cruel World,” penned to sountrack his wife’s walk down the aisle at their 2017 wedding. (“For me, the song is about being resilient in a time of great uncertainty,” he said at the time.)

Fast-forward to 2019, and much has changed. Grossi is a father and a homeowner and, on the creative front, an artist with a new record label. The announcement this month that he has signed to Sony Records Masterworks came with the unveiling of a new song, “All Eyes on You.”

“At its core, ‘All Eyes on You’ is a devotional piece for companionship, a testament to one’s sacrifice in the pursuit of something beyond oneself,” he says of the song, which was co-produced by Andrew Sarlo (Bon Iver, Big Thief, Adrienne Lenker) and features Joey Waronker on drums. “There’s true strength in submission to someone else, in the hope of creating something bigger and purer.”

It’s what Active Child does best — choral vocals that exude intimacy, with warm, expansive production, as if the artist is singing from the belly of some futuristic digi-cathedral. Add your own finger-snaps.

The video for the song was directed by Isaac Ravishankara.

||| Watch: The video for “All Eyes on You”

||| Live: Active Child headlines the Teragram Ballroon on Oct. 30. Tickets.

||| Previously: Live at Immanuel Presbyterian, live at the El Rey, “Subtle,” “She Cut Me,” “Johnny Belinda,” “Playing House,” Ears Wide Open (“She Was a Vision”)