Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros spent the summer touring heavily in support of their self-titled album, and those on-stage excursions provided the fodder for the live video for "Life Is Hard."
It was recorded live on August 25 at New York's Black Box Theatre, and despite the lack of background noise, the description on YouTube confirms that an audience was on hand. The visuals for this cinematic soul-rock duet are a little more theatrical that your average live clip, since it begins with a young kid miming the opening piano plinks, and we witness seemingly random faces emerging from the shadows throughout.
In a comment on YouTube, the band wrote, "Two major inspirations for this video exist — One was to, in a visually controlled, poignant, and real way, exhibit and record ourselves live — the performance is entirely live. The other was to respond to the pop music industry of the last 20 or more years, in which performance music videos are nearly always a suped-up, lip-synced karaoke, and a major contributor to that which is flimsy and feigned about pop music today."
It was recorded live on August 25 at New York's Black Box Theatre, and despite the lack of background noise, the description on YouTube confirms that an audience was on hand. The visuals for this cinematic soul-rock duet are a little more theatrical that your average live clip, since it begins with a young kid miming the opening piano plinks, and we witness seemingly random faces emerging from the shadows throughout.
In a comment on YouTube, the band wrote, "Two major inspirations for this video exist — One was to, in a visually controlled, poignant, and real way, exhibit and record ourselves live — the performance is entirely live. The other was to respond to the pop music industry of the last 20 or more years, in which performance music videos are nearly always a suped-up, lip-synced karaoke, and a major contributor to that which is flimsy and feigned about pop music today."
