Blame Me from Fatigue by L'Rain

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my background in dance as a kid. As a part of my training, I had to take a miming class for a year: it was a tool to begin to help us understand the intricacies of theater, and to explore the expressiveness of our faces and bodies. Now, in this moment of turmoil I've found myself returning to this childhood mime moment in a slightly different form; I've become very interested in clowns. I am fascinated by their predilection for entropy and absurdity, and the clown's general role as the ultimate icon of emotional complexity (the tears of the clown...). There's also something about "freaks" that make me feel at home: people who are deemed useless, dangerous, or too strange to understand. Who doesn't feel misunderstood in this time of social media, social chaos, and social scarcity? I also recently learned that my great grandfather was an aerialist in the circus, so there's a personal connection for me too-- I know almost nothing about him, but I sometimes make up stories in my head about what his life could have been like as a Black circus performer in a pre-Universoul Circus world.

The concept for this video came to me fairly quickly: I knew it had to be slow-moving and in Black and white, with a clown or magician performing one action throughout the entirety of the song. I worked with Andy Swartz to fill in all the gaps and to develop the concept: he's been such an incredible creative force behind this project. I couldn't figure out what the main character would be doing during the duration of the song, but it came to Andy in a flash: what if the clown started eating the make-up they were putting on their face? An act that is both resourceful and desperate, playful and disturbing. Contradictory in ways that interest me as I explore the complexity of my own inner universe through music: grieving, silly, joyful, thankful, regretful, angry, paranoid, etc to infinity. "Blame Me" in particular is a song about the guilt I feel around death and grieving: regrets about things I wish I’d done or said while people were alive, things I wish I could have done or said to keep them alive.

I was watching the brilliant videos for Collina Strada's Fall 2021 campaign, inspired by the Animorphs series. One of the models, Atinka, caught my eye, and I looked her up on instagram. The first photos I saw were images of her pregnant, dressed up as a clown. They were such captivating images I messaged her immediately, and she graciously agreed to be in the video. The rest, as they say, is history!

Under the mononym L'Rain, Brooklyn native Taja Cheek has quickly become an
acclaimed and sought-after figure in New York experimental music. A multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and vocalist, her songs are equally rooted in r&b, jazz, noise, and pop: at once visceral, spiritual, ethereal, and urgent.