Julia Logue steps through with her new video for “Energy”

A door stands open on the beach, framing the incoming surf. This is the opening shot of the new video for “Energy” from Julia Logue, and also serves as the framing metaphor for the Portland singer’s most ambitious video to date. “Energy” is the penultimate track on Welcome To Your Sunrise, Logue’s debut record released just at the end of last year, and the song serves as the setup to the record’s titular closer, the dusky arpeggios building over a lurching beat, with Logue looking for a way through. Repeated throughout the song are the following lines, more mantra than hook:

I don’t like what’s in front of me

I don’t like what’s in front of me

So I gotta change my energy

Change the energy

The “Energy” video, directed by Greyfaen Eastland, maps this search onto a series of recognizably Oregonian landscapes, but is shot in such a way that the locales feel unsettling, liminal, familiar and yet unfamiliar thanks to the striking lighting and composition by DP Taylor Humphrey and colorist Grant Benesh. Logue walks through each locale in succession–the train, the mountain, the dunes, the beach–singing as she goes. As it repeats, the line “change the energy” seems to refer to the cuts between locations. The question becomes one of agency: is Logue being subjected to the changes, or is she the one in control?

In addition to the door, the motif of the hourglass appears, and stands at first glance for fleeting time, but as it sits in the sand of the dunes, it also represents a kind of artificial distinction, the grains within the glass weighted by a the significance of their separation. So too does the door frame standing free against the landscape, it’s presence suggesting a wall which does not, in fact, exist. These are the objects of our anxieties, our self-imposed obstacles, but as Logue would have us realize, sometimes what seems closed can actually be opened, and stepped through.