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Premiere: Guest Directors’s “Parachute On”

Release date: May 24th, 2019

Dan Ray May 24, 20191 Comment
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Premiere: Guest Directors’s “Parachute On” May 24, 20191 Comment

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo courtesy of Guest Directors

On February 22nd, local part-shoegaze, part-psych-rock quartet Guest Directors released their third EP, Dream the Currents. Today, we bring you the premiere of the music video for “Parachute On,” the opening track from the EP.

Guest Directors drummer Rian Turner created the video using a public domain propaganda film from the 1950s. The original film depicted aliens on Mars — specifically in the city of Oggville, under the leader Ogg — transitioning from a communist federation to a thriving collective through studying how the United States of America structured competition and drilled for oil and implementing those tactics into their own Martian society.

In “Parachute On,” Turner flips this narrative on its head and tells the story in reverse. The video opens with Colonel Cosmic being sent to America under Ogg’s command. As Cosmic traverses through his new-found world, you can’t help but feel for him, confused and alone, as singer Julie D croons, “dream the currents guide you home.”

Cosmic eventually finds his way to a public library, where he ferociously devours the material in several large books. Once he makes his way back to Mars, we finally see the titles of what he was reading: “Competition: More for All” and “Story of Oil.”

He shows Ogg the books, and, as guitar riffs pull you into the narrative, we see the Martians being herded to an arena. All standing with their arms crossed and sneers on their faces, the Martians are crowed into rows. Ogg comes to his pulpit, notices the energy, and the video fades out as he demands applause and his citizens oblige.

“If Martians implemented societal changes based on what they would learn from a visit to the United States in 2019, I suspect the outcome would be more much like what I edited this video to show: the presence of a ubiquitous cult of personality, propaganda, uniformity, state-enforced conformity, dissatisfaction, homogeneity, etc,” said Turner.

Check out the exclusive premiere below, and catch Guest Directors live in concert at Belltown Yacht Club on June 7th, with Black Ferns and Vibragun.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

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  1. Pingback: Video premiere for “Parachute On” – GUEST DIRECTORS

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