Bailey Bryan Celebrates Self Love in ‘Grimy’ Video for ‘Perspective’
"The Congress Inn is a classy joint, lemme tell you," Bryan shares.
Bailey Bryan brings a poignant message of self acceptance to life in the video for her new single, “Perspective.” And at the 2019 CMA Music Festival, she told Sounds Like Nashville how it all went down.
Speaking backstage after a spirited set at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater, the promising young songwriter explained that “Perspective” started out fairly typical — but soon took on a new, more soulful weight. Featuring an intriguing Top-40 pop sound, filled with laid-back beats and tasteful electronic embellishments, the song is a tribute to the most empowering kind of love there is.
“I wrote it from a basic love song standpoint of just like, ‘I love you, you give me a new perspective on myself,’” Bryan says. “But after producing it and performing it live over and over again, the meaning has kind of evolved for me. Now when I sing it I’m kind of singing it to myself. The song is just about a love that makes you feel whole and confident as an individual — as opposed to incomplete without another person. I think real love makes you realize you’re complete the way you are, whether that’s a relationship, a friendship, your parents or your faith.”
That idea plays out in creative fashion in the song’s cinematic video. Filmed at the Congress Inn on Nashville’s once vibrant, but now often seedy Dickerson Pike, a number of distinct story lines take place all at the same time, with the track’s central theme connecting them together in the end. But of all the different characters, Bryan’s favorite might be the location itself.
“The Congress Inn is a classy joint, lemme tell you,” she says with a laugh. “It’s just a really old-school motel, straight out of the early ’70s. The sign on the side of the road says ‘Clean Rooms and Color TVs,’ like that’s still what they’re advertising as their big selling point. It’s just this cool, grimy motel, and we wanted to shoot the video there to showcase different people’s lives.
“The video has a number of different characters, one is an old man, another is a mom, and another is the maid who goes in to clean the rooms,” Bryan goes on. “They all have different storylines that represent different kinds of love, and then I’m just singing to myself in the mirror — which represents self love. We just wanted to do it in a grimy motel because that makes everything seem cooler.” (laughs)
“Perspective” is out now and is also the name of Bryan’s upcoming six-song EP — expected for release this fall — which finds Bryan taking her message of self love to heart. She took control of the project’s sound in a bigger way than she had on 2017’s So Far, pushing back fear to create something 100-percent “her.” She’ll be playing the new tracks for fans at country festivals across the U.S. this summer.
