MELBOURNE, Australia. November. 2021. Off the back of her recent much-anticipated single release Find Your Way Back, Melbourne musician Georgia Fields has once again collaborated with award-winning filmmaker Rohan Spong on the visuals for the track’s accompanying film clip.

Concepted and created during Melbourne’s final lockdown of 2021, the clip’s creative sketchbook style came to life out of necessity – partly due to COVID-19 restrictions, and partly as a creative response to the sonic and poetic elements of the multifaceted track.

Informed by the urgent rhythm and sentimental lyrical content, the clip is a colourful deep dive into Fields’ adolescence; a creative piecing together of fragments of memories from a childhood spent in transit:

Rohan and I have made ten music videos together across more than a decade – and I must admit, when he first pitched the concept for the ‘Find Your Way Back’ video to me… even I was a bit wary! So, I was going to have to film myself with my phone? In front of a blue bedsheet, taped to my bookcase? And it was going to look like I was drawn into a sketchbook?  But I’m so glad I trusted him. He had the vision in his mind right from the beginning, so he was able to direct me very clearly, even over text message.

Something special happens when I hand one of my songs over to Rohan. Not only does he just “get it” – but he also imagines things that I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, and his visualisations of my music always reveal a deeper understanding of my own songs to me. For example, the way he used the dandelion as a visual metaphor, and the arrows, and the diving woman.

When I perform ‘Find Your Way Back’ live, I usually meet at least one person after the show who moved a lot in their childhood, who can relate. So it’s been really special to see Rohan extrapolate that feeling of movement and transience into the music video in such an emotional way – to draw it out, literally.”

Created in isolation, with Fields’ parts filmed entirely on an iPhone, the music video incorporates drawings, photographs, hand-drawn animations, stock footage and a central performance shot by Fields, in her home, against a large blue sheet that Spong later composited.

With numerous unifying principles most prominently displayed through the sketchbook element, viewers can find recurring motifs amongst the sketches on closer inspection. As the song develops, various graphic elements, including arrows (the birds flying in formation), dandelion seeds, and hand-drawn illustrations, become disorienting and kaleidoscopic. These elements act as visual shorthand for the narrator’s urgent need to return to a sense of home that doesn’t exist.

On the filmmaker’s creative inspiration:

“One of the exciting finds of scouring stock footage websites was David Montogmery’s ‘Dandelion Culture’: an art project wherein animations of dandelions are encouraged to be spread over the internet and throughout other artist’s works. In many ways, the dandelion is a great visual interpretation of the song’s core idea: the seeds are taken by the wind, and the plant often blooms far from its origin, unaware of its history, with no sense of home, other than where it finds itself rooted in the present.

It was a very MacGuyver way of shooting a music video, and yet I enjoyed the challenge of working in this way and the puzzle of putting it all together.”

The Music video for ‘Find Your Way Back’ will be released at 11 am on Tuesday, October 26th. The track is available to stream on all major streaming platforms, including Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer and TIDAL.

ABOUT FIND YOUR WAY BACK

Find Your Way Back (released September 15th, 2021) is a widescreen vision of melodic indie-pop: punchy drums, zigzagging guitar lines, shimmering omnichord, and the warm coo of a vintage Wurlitzer. Fields’ distinctive vocal brings to mind the piercing, understated clarity of Metals-era Feist and the shoulders-back power-stance of Sharon van Etten.

Find Your Way Back marks a new collaboration with producer/drummer Joshua Barber (Vic Park; Greta Ray; Emma Anglesea). The pair are currently working on Fields’ forthcoming third album, Hiraeth (pronounced “hee-raith”), set for release in 2022.

ABOUT GEORGIA FIELDS

Georgia Fields has been performing, producing and releasing original music for over a decade. A festival favourite, she has appeared at St Kilda Festival, Queenscliff Music Festival, Apollo Bay Music Festival, Mullum Music Festival, Festival of Voices Hobart, NightQuarter Gold Coast, and Majors Creek Festival.

Her most recent full-length album Astral Debris was critically acclaimed, receiving airplay on Double J, ABC Radio National, PBS, Triple R and community radio. Astral Debris was awarded four stars by The Sydney Morning Herald and lauded in The Herald Sun newspaper as “her finest, most expansive work yet.”

In 2010 Georgia assembled her 11-piece ‘Mini-Indie-Orchestra’ and recorded her debut self-titledalbum. Georgia Fields was awarded Album of the Week by ABC Radio National and Beat Magazine, which saw her perform on national television for SBS’ RocKwiz.

In 2017, Georgia released Afloat, Adrift (2017), a retrospective EP captured live with The Andromeda String Quartet. Raw and visceral, yet sweeping with an old-world romance, Afloat, Adrift features new string quartet versions of material spanning her 10-year career. Frankie Magazine premiered the release, proclaiming, “Georgia Fields has a voice you simply cannot unhear”.

As well as working on new music, earlier this year, Fields launched Mother Lode: an online community and resource for musicians who are mothers. The website and Instagram provide practical support for freelance or self-employed musicians, specifically tailored to mothers’ unique challenges in the pandemic era.

Website: georgiafields.com