Two former and/or future lovers go about their almost synchronous lives in this artful and rather beautiful split-screen video for The Album Leaf. The two walk the same streets, visit the same bars and even read the same authors — Haruki Murakami, literature's current master of all that is offbeat, was a wise choice. "Always For You" also reaps dividends thanks to shooting in the band's San Diego hometown. Besides using their actual practice space as the performance location, the video also includes numerous well-known landmarks and hangouts — including The Turf Club, which is the city's, if not the country's finest grill-your-own-food bar.
Director Aaron Stewart-Ahn shines a light on The Album Leaf "Always For You"
The conceptual hook came right out of the song. I wanted to create distance and yearning in the same frame. I'd also just started a relationship where it had turned out that we'd been present in the same spaces unknowingly and coincidentally years before we'd ever met.
The shooting plan was crazy - we shot one day with the guy in all the locations. We could only afford one video clamshell as our monitor and for playback the next day to match shots up. So, we'd get our frame trying to think of how we were only shooting half the image, knowing the next day we'd have to shoot the rest of the frame. The next day we shot with the girl in all the same locations at different times of day, and asked all the extras to return wearing the same outfits. So we had a particularly strange sensation of deja vu. We'd eyeball it and keep our fingers crossed. I didn't want the joins to be seamless; I wanted it to have a sort of feeling like when you take a panoramic image with a stills camera and join the prints later and it's never perfect.
-->watch "Always For You" in Quicktime
The Album Leaf "Always For You" (Sub Pop)
Aaron Stewart-Ahn, director/producer | Otaku-House, production co | Tarin Anderson, DP | Rob Ryang, editor
