News
Mountain Time – the solo project of singer-songwriter Chris Simpson of Mineral and The Gloria Record – just shared the music video for “Empty Graves,” a single lifted from Simpson’s acclaimed new album, 'Music For Looking Animals'. Directed by Gates Bradley (White Walls Say Nothing), the serene and beautifully shot black & white video for “Empty Graves” speaks to the spiritual depth of Simpson’s latest work along with our collective desire for live music again in any form during this difficult year.
Simpson had the following to share about the video and how it came together:
“Gates [Bradley] sent me some photographs he had been taking on his LA morning motorcycle rides that featured barren urban landscapes and clear, unpolluted skies. I loved his ideas and I love what he came up with. The images are so beautiful. When everything just screeches to a halt like that and there’s this sudden clarity and almost a heaviness, like a blanket laying over everything, keeping it quiet and still. And then the signs of life carrying on across it—the birds slowly traversing the long shots. It’s exquisite.”
In the aftermath of the dissolution of his adored bands, Simpson took a step back from making music for the first time since his mid-teens. And it was during this period where an affinity for the music of the Sixties and Seventies such as Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Harry Nilsson, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and many more – along with the freedom and expression of jazz and artists who radically followed their own vision – took root. With additional inspiration drawn from psychology and eastern philosophy, the beauty of the natural world, Simpson’s children and wife, old Time Life books, and the self-stated immenseness of the universe, Mountain Time has become almost more of a state-of-mind than a moniker.