Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes Return with Video for New Single “Paralyzed”

It’s been about a year and a half since we shared new music from Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes, when the beloved local synth pop outfit dropped Bemidji, the companion EP to 2014’s well-received Kid Tiger. As you may have seen on our Spotify playlist this week, DE&TGL are back with a new single, “Paralyzed,” that sees the band continuing to mature and expand on their pop mastery, ala contemporaries like Phoenix and Ra Ra Riot. The new single was accompanied by an excellently shot video (you can check it out below), which even features some images from the recent solar eclipse.

Frontman Daniel Ellsworth described the process for the video to us, “We made the video for ‘Paralyzed’ with director Casey Pierce at a company called Tournament in Nashville. Aside from his video work, Casey is an incredible painter. A lot of what he does in his paintings, he brings into his video work. Beautiful striking images, colorful, at times abstract. We knew we wanted to capture that in this video.” He continued with how that played into the feeling behind the new track, “The song is about shedding layers, getting older, and learning that the more we think we know about everything the less we actually know. About opening our eyes to everything going on in the world and realizing how small we really are. It’s about how those feelings can often be overwhelming, but how it’s still our job as humans to pay attention and to make as positive of an impact as we can in our brief time on this planet.” Ellsworth’s favorite part will likely be a favorite to a number of Nashvillians (and those elsewhere in the path of totality), “My favorite thing about the video is how it ends with some incredible footage [Casey] took of the total eclipse that happened [August 21, 2017]. It’s a reminder that for a brief two minutes, millions of people were looking up at the sky together in awe. For a moment, in spite of all our differences, all of us were connected, eyes wide open, humbled by the greatness of it all.”

The announcement of the new single comes with word of a third full-length coming in 2018 as well. Fashion will be released in three parts next year – Chapter One in January 2018, Chapter Two in spring of 2018, and the full album to follow late next year. The band are currently finalizing some local dates for later this year, and we’ll update you on upcoming shows when we have more information.