Video Premiere: JOE McKEE – Flightless Bird
Have you heard of JOE McKEE? He was raised in the Darling Ranges of Western Australia and once played in a band called SNOWMAN. Now JOE McKEE is a solo artist who slowly loses touch with reality. “I am delving deeper into my mind-mine. I will return with jewels and treasures to share with the world. Burning Boy is the first of these treasures. The deeper I dig into my mind-mine, the larger and more beautiful and more luminous and valuable the nuggets become. I am equipped only with a box of matches. I must illuminate every cavern and neural pathway in order to eliminate all the empty places in my mind-mine. I am working from half drawn maps that have been left behind by the likes of Malvina Reynolds, John Berryman, Ivor Cutler, William Eggleston, Selda Bagcan, Maya Deren, Judee Sill, Jonas Mekas and Richard Brautigan.”
NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION premiers JOE McKEE‘s new video Flightless Bird, which is a wonderful song that couldn’t be more dreamy than it is. About the song, Flightless Bird, JOE McKEE tells:
Flightless Bird is a re-appropriation of an old Aboriginal dreamtime story about the Emu and the birth of the Australian terrain. Three sister birds flew down to the Terra Nullius (Australia) all the way from Orions Belt. The two elder sisters clipped the wings of the younger sister and left her to be the guardian of the land. This made the younger sister angry and she became an agressive creature. No longer able to fly, she began building towers, from wood and bark, for her to climb back to her home on Orions belt. She left the Termite Woman to guard the towers but of course she kept munching them down. The emu would rebuild the giant towers and again the termite woman would tear them down. This repeat process contributed to the landscape of Australia. All the debris and crumbled towers are the hills and mountains of Australia’s terrain. I can relate to that stupid emu. Trying so desperately to escape Australia. At the end of the song there is a realization that this place is a part of the emu and she must build her throne upon the land and embrace it. The tumbled tower represents my old band Snowman. The throne represents my solo endeavours. So that’s the song in a nutshell.
Of course, NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION, always wants to know what “hope” and “passion” mean to artists. For JOE McKEE hope means a lack of confidence in oneself. “Hope will lead me nowhere. Devotion and blind faith will get me to wherever I need to be.” About “Passion” he tells that, for him, it “is a rare affliction that curses only a small few people on this earth. It is a double edged sword. Symptoms include an ‘all-consuming head-rush and dopamine flood’ alongside ‘delusions’, ‘tunnel-vision’ and ‘mild autism’.”
Enjoy JOE McKEE‘s new video Flightless Bird below. Dream away and dive into the emotional world of a flightless bird.
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JOE McKEE