This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
CMU Approved
Approved: MT Hadley
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 14 November 2019
MT Hadley’s debut LP ‘Empty’ is an album of stories. Stories like that of ‘Private Eye’, a mini non-visual film noir about a detective who falls in love with the woman another man has paid him to follow. Or ‘Rattle’, a ballad sung to a newborn about the dismal existence that awaits them. So, as you can see, it’s a one way trip to chuckle town.
The stories continue in the videos for the album’s singles too. Each one features subtitles delivering – rather than lyrics, as you might expect – a slightly different story to the one told in the song.
It’s a nice touch. Even though Hadley himself says of musicians making videos to go alongside their tracks: “They just take up more space on a website, that’s why people like music videos. They’re just bullshit, boring”.
Despite that presumably tongue in cheek viewpoint, song and video come together to make something truly moving with the album’s most recent single ‘Janet’. The song, which was championed by Frank Ocean when it was originally released in 2016, is an ode to Hadley’s late mother.
“The song is about memories, which we keep even after someone is gone”, he says. “The video reflects that. Receiving messages about this song from people it has moved is always strange and wonderful. It staggers me that a song so personal to me can be so personal to others, and grant them similar catharsis. Thank you for these messages. I suppose I hope more people hear the song and enjoy a relief similar to that it grants me”.
Watch the video for ‘Janet’ here:
