Music video as art is so often obscured by commercialism in the mainstream that the often low-bar, personality-driven standard appeals even to upcoming independent bands and musicians. Insert requisite close-up of the hi-hat. Insert extreme close-up of the lead singer. Ask singer to look intense or sexy or both at the same time. Insert shot of fingers strumming. Add in a few quirky moments with balloons and women in skimpy outfits. In and out. Yet, for as many of these videos crop up, coming and going in hackneyed wonder, there are the ones that tell stories, or the ones by god that are so off-kilter that they’re unforgettable. Tom Barndt’s music video for Switchyard’s “Salt of the Sea” falls into this former category.

Under power lines set against the bright blue sky of Las Vegas, a little boy grows up with extraordinary powers. Mixed with Switchyard’s jazzy and nostalgic melody, the video conjures up memory of childhood. “You know how you have little triggers that put you back in that magic place when you’re a little kid?” asks Switchyard’s Rachel Bellinsky. “Those triggers for me are like, the sound of airplanes flying overhead, the smell of wet gravel, little snapshots…”

“For a child all these things are possible,” Barndt says. “And, it kind of ties in to the naivette of independent filmmakers sometimes, like you’re not aware of what you can’t do, and so you just try a whole bunch of things. Some of them work out, and some of them don’t. But, for a kid, these things don’t seem so far-fetched.”

In crafting “Salt of the Sea,” a track from Switchyard’s debut album The Secret Life of Spiders, Barndt’s approach was less based on the song’s literal meanings than on identifying the proper tone. “When I listened to the chorus, that told me to set it in the mid to late 60s,” Barndt says. “I just started thinking about how the sound would look and then just go from there. In many cases what you end up coming up with seems to fit in well.

“The lyrics are the last thing I take into account. The video should be something that the band or musician would never really come up with. They know what the song is about, and they have their own vision of it. So, instead of trying to match that it’s more about where my ideas intersect with their ideas.”

Combining home video Super 8 footage with production footage and taking hints from the rather exuberant son of a friend, Barndt essentially compiled the video out of seemingly disparate pieces, saying “I used to storyboard everything meticulously, and what I found happening though was that it was great to have a plan like that but leave room for accidents. A lot of time the accidents end up being the best parts of any film.”

From a songwriting and music style standpoint, the truth held up for Bellinsky as well. “I’m not really a big jazz fan myself, which people are horrified when I tell them that for some reason,” she admits. “But, I tend to go that way. It’s instinctual for some reason, and especially for that song, it lends itself to be jazzy. Then we just got carried away. We were like, “Let’s get an upright bass. Let’s get some horns,” and it just became this jazz experiment.

“I’m not even exactly sure what part of music it is that I want to do when I quote-on-quote grow up, even though I grew up a long time ago,” she continues. “I just know that from a very young age I loved music; I was obsessed with my radio. It was also, I think, my mom’s way of communicating and having fun with us when we were kids. She sang to us constantly. So, I knew I wanted to do something with music, but I’m still not exactly sure what form that will take.”

While she works on her second album, Bellinsky’s aware that she can’t make this album in the same manner she did The Secret Life of Spiders. “It was collection of everything I’d written—or, a collection of everything I thought was any good that I had written,” she says. “So it’s like that first CD is a collection of all your good stuff. You have a lifetime to collect all that.

“Most of my inspiration comes from a dark, kind of melancholy place. I don’t really feel like writing songs when I’m happy. I think a lot of people are like that,” she says. “It’s weird because I’m super happy most of the time. So, I’m writing, but I’m not writing songs as much.”

In the spaces between her writing, Bellinsky collaborates with her mother on art projects, contributes songs for films, serves as an “art dictator” for Ink Thief Magazine and plays acoustic shows throughout San Diego. Oh, and sometimes in there, she says excitedly, she dreams up her desert island album picks. “Now that I have the chance to tell you, I have no idea. It would probably be like David Sylvian, some Kate Bush, some Elvis Costello, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, some Tool because they’re amazing…,” she pauses. “You know how it is. You have a billion CDs in your Top Ten.”

While Switchyard and likewise Barndt’s video are by no means eschewing the mainstream, the obsession with commercialism runs antithetical to the intent of either of those artistic works. Unlike the treatment of so many vocalists portrayed in music videos, Bellinsky is not framed as a sellable personality. Rather, it’s as if she’s a bard, her glance off screen right, her thoughts caught in her own void as she sings into existence the images of magic and science that Barndt weaves throughout the video. “It just doesn’t get watered down I think,” Barndt says, adding that the small crew allows for an intimacy often lost in mainstream work.

“Some people are very open to those kinds of things, but other people, if they hear the phrase ‘music video’ and then they see it, they’re turned off right away like, “Well, that’s not a real music video. That’s a project, but a real video looks like, “This,”” he says.

To those who fall into that category, we counter back, “Yeah, but a music video looks like this too, and you know what? It’s better for it.”

For more information visit www.switchyardmusic.com. Also, check out www.inkthiefmag.com, the literary minded online magazine that Bellinsky co-founded.

For more information on the filmmaker, visit www.tomandsamara.com.