PREMIERE | Adam Brookes, "Lonely Life" ft. Compa Cut
The electro eclectic Bay Area universe of Adam Brookes; photographed by Zen Cohen.
The world can currently feel like a cold, strangely desolate and largely empty place, almost devoid of the former meaningful human interactions we once took for granted. For those living in the big cities, the dystopian vibe feels larger like a cyberpunk novella take on a Franz Kafka work in a world where the anxiety and unease lingers in the air like the Bay Area fog and steam from the sewer exhaust grates. This is the motif and mood of Adam Brooke’s new single “Lonely Life” ft. Compa Cut that is accompanied by a wild cinematic video from the visual talents of Thomas Gellert, Mike Kozlenko, Omri Ohana and Roma Black.
The video captures the rolling clouds that collect about the Bay, the traffic on the 101 and plenty of jagged dashboard POVs all witnessed in elapsed time. Bathing the frame with the luminescence of vehicle and utility lights that populate the locales of San Francisco in the dead of midnight; Adam Brooke's ode to the singular "Lonely Life" is delivered with heavy whispered breaths set to an array of neon hued metropolitan street scenes that feel straight out of the vision of a Nicolas Winding Refn popcorn flick. From Adam’s own claustrophobic depictions of the quarantined life to Compa Cut’s guttural utterances; the feeling of being out on your own in the city is felt with every bar, beat, synth pulse and hollow atmospheric resonances in the mix. The pseudo-apocalyptic sentiment of contemporary strangeness is conveyed in the anxious elements of the mysteriously styled production to the video’s usage of lighting effects that contribute to the ambience of a solitary society seen and heard in a state of absentia and near (almost) abandonment.
Reflections on solitude with Adam Brookes; photographed by Ryan Herceg.
Adam Brookes provided some meditations on the solitary states that informed the new single:
”Lonely Life” came together recently at a time when I was facing a lot of personal change, both expected and at times unwelcome. More or less walking away from a decade with Dangermaker, seeing less of some friends, more meaningful interactions with a few others, and thinking about family and being a new father. It can be a very isolating change to go through. Once COVID happened that isolation was greatly magnified and many songs I've been working on lately took on a whole new meaning to me, I feel like now is the time for them to be heard.
Adam Brookes enveloped within electric cathedrals of light; photographed by Zen Cohen.
When I first began work on the track it was a very new production process for me under different circumstances than songs I've worked on before. I was hired to produce some instrumental electronic music for The North Face to use, there were specific constraints I wasn't really used to and I had to deliver pieces in about a week. Very fast, deliberate songwriting. After a few all-nighters it turned out to be an eye-opening process out of my comfort zone, but something I've always been interested in doing, stemming from a longtime love of electronic music and film scores that has changed the way I approach my own songs now.
A dramatic portrait of Adam Brookes; photographed by Reid McNally.
I composed several one minute demos with different synth plugins and 808 & 909 drum sampler apps on an iPad, purposely low-tech. I read somewhere that Damon Albarn recorded an entire Gorillaz album that way, so I was drawn to the idea of turning around ideas fast. I never planned on turning any of those ideas into actual songs as I was still active in Dangermaker at the time. None of those ideas would work there anyway, but some stuck with me so I kept working at them for the hell of it. “Lonely Life” is one of those ideas, very hip hop leaning from the start so I kept it that way and asked my friend Compa Cut if he was into doing a verse. The final track here is the result of taking all of this and properly producing it which has been a huge learning experience, but I've had some time on my hands...
Cover art for the “Lonely Life” single.