Jayne Kelli spent 40 hours editing the video for “Only In The Dream” (a song “born out of a vortex of drama, where love and obsession collide”) trying to translate that urgency visually.
“I was chasing the feeling that every frame had to mirror the song’s intensity,” she says.
After more than a decade as half the husband-and-wife Americana duo Swearingen & Kelli, the Michigan-raised, Nashville-based singer/songwriter is stepping out on her own—at least for the time being. She and partner AJ Swearingen celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary this past year, and it doesn’t look like an upcoming solo album will kill that momentum. What’s more, Swearingen co-produced “Only In A Dream,” helped her shoot the video and basically hasn’t left her side as a trusted collaborator and cheerleader.
“I originally wrote the song on the guitar in one sitting, but then I moved it to piano,” says Kelli. “I was aiming for a relentless undercurrent—and when I gave AJ that orientation, he captured it sonically by pulling you deeper into the song with those dreamy steel lines and drums.”
The duo filmed the video in a cornfield at sunset. “I looked up and saw a cotton-candy sky and thought of the movie What Dreams May Come,” says Kelli. “During the edit, I wanted to capture the kind of fierce love that follows you into your own private hell and pulls you back out … someone willing to go all in, unafraid of the shadow self that comes with the other person.”
We’re proud to premiere Jayne Kelli’s “Only In The Dream.”
—Hobart Rowland
