Lo Carmen‘s creative CV runs deep – from author to actress, songwriter to singer and musician. She’s been a constant on the Sydney arts scene for decades now, constantly producing great work that always seems to possess a timeless quality.

Carmen’s last album, Lovers Dreamers Fighters (2017), found her exploring more of a country influenced palette and it worked beautifully. Now she has a new album on the way, with her band The Great Beyond (Sam Worrad – guitar, Ken Gormly – bass, Cec Condon – drums) and on the new single ‘I Just Had To Run‘, the video of which we are very pleased to premiere, her father Peter Head features on Hammond organ.

Coming across like a dreamy, countrified amalgam of the Velvet Underground and The Clean, Carmen weaves her breathy intonations between the jangly guitars and shuffling push and pull of the rhythm section. It all works perfectly, sounding loose and relaxed – a group of players serving the song without pretension or self-indulgence.

Carmen explains that she “wanted to write something that captured that restless feeling of being at odds with the world around you and just needing to ‘feel the streets fade behind’ and ‘your heart beat in time’, crawl out of a hole and carve out your own space to shake it all off and get free.“

“Somehow it also became a personal statement, or soundtrack – sometimes songs just say what they want to say and you think you’ve just written a bunch of throwaway pretty rhymes and down the track realise you’ve revealed your deepest self. That’s how I feel with this song. I hope it keeps you company while you shake the world off and find your way back to somewhere/someone you want to be…“

The video clip, directed by Katerina Stratos, blends footage of Sydney with Carmen as a playful apparition inhabiting the various landscapes. It’s a wonderful visual accompaniment to the song, building on the dreaminess of the song and aspirations of freedom and unshackling one’s self.

Director Katerina Stratos says ‘I wanted Lo to fill up the centre of the screen, singing with joyfulness and urgency while the background travels through a world of Sydney tunnels, both natural and man made. Both Bjork’s ‘Big Time Sensuality’ and Maya Deren’s film “Meshes of the Afternoon” were strong tonal inspirations.  Originally we thought to make it in black and white, but we had captured such great colours and textures in the background footage (which was shot as stills and made into stop frame animation), so we kept it colourful. We captured that internal dreamscape feeling of the song by making Lo’s form transparent and omniscient.”

Lo explains ’To me the song is about outrunning everything that’s not right in your world and bursting into a place of freedom and weightlessness – Katerina (a very open and innovative creator who I’ve been lucky to collaborate with on multiple projects over many years) immediately knew how to translate that idea and feeling into film, so I just did whatever I could to bring her vision to life. At the last minute I decided to wear a wedding dress and veil inspired by the ‘runaway bride on the bus’ finale in ‘The Graduate’, and the utter relief of throwing caution to the wind and doing what you need to do rather than what’s expected of you.’