“Forced Witness has a grander sound, thanks to a full band and co-production by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado. Here, you can kind of imagine a pervy version of Bruce Springsteen playing Giants Stadium, where he and everyone in the audience are hooked up to both life support and the Craigslist Casual Encounters page.” — Flavorwire
Forced Witness, the second album by Alex Cameron, is set for a September 8th release on Secretly Canadian. After sharing “Candy May” and “Stranger’s Kiss,” the duet with Angel Olsen, Cameron now presents “Runnin’ Outta Luck” and its accompanying video, filmed in the Hastings, UK seaside and directed by Nick MacMahon. The song was written by Cameron, Roy Molloy (saxophone) and Brandon Flowers (backing vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass), and features Jonathan Rado (guitars, keyboards, bass) and Kirin J Callinan (guitar). Cameron describes it below.
“Most of the time me ‘n’ Roy have around 80 bucks in our business bank account. Good money. Kind of money makes you taste every egg in the omelet. I remember we’d played a show in Tallahassee to about seven people, and we were driving over to Atlanta to make a flight. Spirits were high. What with Roy tapping at the steering wheel and me eating my peanut M&Ms. Then my phone vibrated in my pocket. But it wasn’t a notification about terrorism or another nude on my Instagram. It was an email from Brandon Flowers.
Take about two months outta the equation and find me ‘n’ Roy living at the Palms Resort up on Flamingo out there off the Vegas strip. Bein’ far from a millionaire doesn’t mean you can’t live like a millionaire and success doesn’t always hinge on good luck, it can be about other people’s bad luck. Brandon was in a bind with his lyrics, and we were in a bind with our never having come close to a radio hit.
Me, Roy ‘n’ Brandon wrote this song in a day after hiking out to old Icebox Canyon they got out there. Kinda place where they filmed James Gandolfini crying. Kinda place where guys with ponytails climb cliff faces without spotters.
You don’t have to be lucky. Just make sure everyone around you stays unlucky.”
Alex Cameron’s solution to the difficulties we are forced to watch in this baroque clusterf*ckery of the world is a sense of honesty that heals and relieves even as it cleaves us or makes us laugh in self-defense. He’s offering us vivid portraits of misfits who look at the world without illusion and a pure account of the world as he’s seen it. These tracks at first seem shamelessly entertaining, but the love songs and anthems of personal resilience contain as much raw humanity as they do a savvy grasp of the impossible loneliness of the times. If there is darkness in these songs, it is not because taboos can titillate but because Cameron knows that confession has a redeeming power and that people are often at their most startlingly beautiful when their skies have fallen. These songs are alive with the rich detail of life lived and the radical distinctiveness of the stories they tell feel universal.
Watch “Runnin’ Outta Luck” Video –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmlEM–lmdo
Watch “Stranger’s Kiss” Video –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4C-Lw-YaWg
Watch “Candy May” Video –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU01Rix_l2w
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