It can be disheartening when creative projects don’t meet our expectations. Whether it be timing, resources, or just not measuring up to our vision, it’s easy for things to get shelved. But sometimes those dormant ideas simply need time to ferment before being picked back up and, thankfully, Ryan MacGrath has done just that with the video for his song “Before Dawn” from last year’s That Woods.
“It was a more recent decision,” MacGrath says. “We started filming last fall, and I wasn’t really happy with it.” He decided to temporarily shelve the effort, but the impact of the pandemic put a much longer halt to it. It wasn’t until last month that more material was put together and MacGrath found himself happy with the edit.
The video for “Before Dawn” shows MacGrath in various spaces, largely filled with darkness as his face is washed over by vibrant lights. The different sources, both natural and artificial, highlight the singer’s emphatic delivery, and all seem to represent the idea of an incoming dawn as it breaks across him. “There’s a desperation in the song as well,” he notes, and that comes through clearly in the juxtaposition we see him caught between.
While the track itself first appeared on 2019’s That Woods, MacGrath says that he wrote it several years ago on a retreat at a cottage in Adelboden, Switzerland. In trying to wrestle with a lack of desire to create music and a worry of being “dried up”, the motive for his writing retreat manifested in the soul searching words of “Before Dawn.” The situation of the song’s creation and its recent release conjures a sort of inverted mirror; while the self-imposed isolation of the retreat helped invigorate his craft, the songwriter talks about how the necessary isolation of the pandemic has given him no drive to be writing.
“In a way, I’m kind of glad it took time,” MacGrath reflects on the release of “Before Dawn” as a single. “I think it’s so relevant now with all the COVID shit. So many artists are having the same questions – they’re like ‘Maybe I can write, but how do I afford to record this?’ or “How do I share this with people?'”
And it certainly does hit the mark that many artists have felt over the past year. “Before Dawn” speaks to finding that drive in oneself, the will to be creating for the world. Hearing of Ryan MacGrath’s own struggles with meeting his expectations for expression with the video gives some comfort, especially seeing such a solid finished product come out of it. While many of us are waiting for dawn to break, there is still light to be found.