For Seattle songwriter Tomo Nakayama, meaning and connection—within what he calls a “broken world”—come both from what’s there right in front of us as well as what’s in absence. Displayed through Nakayama’s signature dulcet vocals along with guitars that sound like chiming bells, the songwriter’s new single, “Bright and Blue,” offers a picture of what’s important: a roaming natural world without anything other than that which bonds a dear, loving relationship.
“When you’re younger,” says Nakayama, “I think you tend to define yourself by your politics, your job, the music you listen to, the movies you watch. And then you get older and you realize none of that stuff really matters.”
The only people featured in “Bright and Blue,” a video comprised of clips from travels to Japan and Europe, are Nakayama and his wife, the Seattle visual artist Frida Clements. And unless you count a couple dogs frolicking along the way, there is no one else. Instead we admire pastoral cliffs, mist on rocks, and wind-blown plains of seemingly anywhere.
“When I strung [the video] together over this song,” he says, “to me, it really tied into the themes of family and the natural world and human relationships. Maybe you form a family unit, whether it’s a partner or a child or a pet, and your priorities change, and everything else becomes secondary to your love for them. And that shift in perspective, I think, is what the song is about.”
The understanding of deep, singular connection is felt acutely throughout the three-minute ballad. Yet, while most can understand this push toward connection, often we can just as easily forget that to do so requires work and refinement. Nakayama, though, does not let this idea slip through his musical fingers. There is another side to the coin of connection. He sings, “There are some people you must live without.”
“[The song] describes forces that are out of your control, whether it’s by distance or death or just differences in values and hard-wired personalities that you can’t change. The extremely polarized political discourse in the past couple years, and watching several people around me go through the difficult process of cutting some really toxic relationships out of their lives, definitely had something to do with that.”
“Bright and Blue” marks the first single from Nakayama’s upcoming record, Pieces of the Sky, the first he’s self-produced in his new home studio. He calls the album “the most personal record I’ve made, in a lot of ways.” The LP also features Nakayama’s pal, Yuuki Matthews of the Shins on synths, including on “Bright and Blue.”
“[The single] is the hope that I have for the world,” says Nakayama, “and the love I try to hold for everyone, even if it’s from a safe distance—far, far away.”