Trumpeter Swan Premieres the Fascinating Music Video for New Single “Fast We Fall”

Obviously, a lot has happened over these last few years, and Trumpeter Swan has documented their thoughts and feelings on it, both in their new single “Fast We Fall” and their Fast We Fall full-length. The brainchild of musician Drew Patrizi, today we reveal the official music video for the album title track, a fascinating clip recorded live in a tunnel. Both the title track and those that fill out the record grapple with how to attach meaning or positivity to these complicated times in which we live.

Around the time of the writing and recording process behind this album, Patrizi went through a pretty intense personal adventure that saw him make stops living in three States before moving back to Austin, Texas. That return to his roots helped get him into a productive headspace to work on new music, and it also enabled him to reconnect with the community where his career began.

Explaining the origins and motivations for the “Fast We Fall” song and music video, Patrizi explains:

“I came across this tunnel when exploring around during the pandemic and filed it away in my mind as an interesting place to perform a song live. It was off the beaten path, and with its industrial green walls and cavernous reverb, it had this melancholic, almost dystopian quality that felt like it underscored the mood of the song.

“There’s a line in the song, ‘I hear the alarms, the call to arms/I see the writing on the wall/How far we’ve come, how fast we fall,’ and I think of the recurring flugelhorn melody as the ‘sounding of the alarm,’ a clarion call, to wake up and take action. And hearing a horn in a tunnel never disappoints, it makes you stop and pay attention.”

Patrizi continues his explanation, stating that, “For live performance videos, I’ve always been a big fan of the long take/minimal cutting approach, the ‘warts and all’ style where the camera is experiencing the action along with the viewer. It’s way more exciting to see the process unfold, the camera movements, changes in focus, musical anomalies, and the serendipity, verses something perfectly in-tune or perfectly cut.

“It’s always interesting to reinterpret the songs, and impose limitations to see what happens. In contrast to the produced album track, this live acoustic performance is a pretty stark reimagination—which keeps it fresh for the band. And… we got to incorporate an accordion, a first for a Trumpeter Swan song.

“By the way, that’s John Aldridge playing the flugelhorn and the accordion, sometimes at the same time. John is a multifaceted musician, as are George and Aaron, which makes experimenting with different instrumentation intriguing for all of us.”

Trumpeter Swan ‘Fast We Fall’ album artwork

There’s an urgency and energy throughout the record that reflects the complicated times it was recorded. Patrizi is clear about the fact that it is not a concept record, but it does have an overarching theme: pondering how we can cope with a collective “fall from grace” when our narratives on life fall apart, and there is no easy solution in sight or on the horizon. Within this fall from grace is a fragility of relationships, democracy, and much of the connective tissue of society. We’ve all been finding our way through this shared experience together as we grow older, and the album documents this trying journey. There’s a moment of reckoning that not just Patrizi has acknowledged, and Fast We Fall is his attempt to make some sense of it all.

Fast We Fall Track Listing:

1. Nothing to Show
2. American Dream
3. Saint of Lost Causes
4. We Got Something
5. Casualties of Love
6. Something / Nothing
7. Fast We Fall
8. Don’t Concede
9. Dust to Dust