Folk-rock troubadour Tim Wheatley wrote his latest single, the melancholic yet deceptively infectious ‘Lying Low’, shortly after moving from Los Angeles to London. The adjustment from sunny California to the isolation of a new city, far away from family and friends, was almost impossible, recounts the songwriter.
“I stopped talking about how hard I was finding it, because I was drowning in other people’s well-intended but cookie cutter advice. I was going stir crazy in my own company all day and night,” explains Wheatley.
“It was a true test for my mental health, I was suffering and switching up a few different sides of my personality trying to find the one that could best get me through each situation. It was exhausting ‘getting out there’ and making new friends, for some reason during this period I felt I needed to keep to myself to get to the other side.”
Given that most of us have spent the past few months in somewhat similar circumstances – physically isolated from the ones we love – ‘Lying Low’ has an eerie prescience to it. Anchored by Wheatley’s raspy vocals, it’s a song that’s at once almost painfully introspective, but with an underlying thread of universality.
The new single comes accompanied by a raw, black-and-white video directed and filmed by Ben Cook, which we’re premiering today. The clip brings the solitude Wheatley sings about in the song to the screen – encapsulating the private suffering and switching of personalities he describes.
“Ben and I deliberately went in to the filming of the video wanting to capture something completely unrehearsed and candid, with nothing but a light and his new Super8 camera, and possibly a bottle of scotch,” he says.
Watch the video for ‘Lying Low’ below.
