Somebody told me you had given up on your smile

Plenty of very satisfying reviews have been written about this fantastic track, and after listening to it on repeat for a week, I thought I’d contribute my own review of the music video. In my humble, non music critic style.

The excitement I feel every time a new musical release involving Lindsey Stirling comes out is addictive. This video delivers and once again shows that she is a performer to be reckoned with. The fact that she is an instrumental artist, as well as her masterful grasp of numerous genres and unique interpretation with her violin music make it possible to integrate her playing in practically any collaboration. At the same time, she not only showcases herself, but compliments the artists she works with on a given project, bringing out the best in all those involved. Different talent coming together requires good choosing, and happily it looks like “Dying for You” is a result of just that.

A pianist plays inside what looks like a roomy, abandoned church or cathedral, while Alex Aris begins to sing the story, not with hopelessness, but with mounting force. To me you don’t have to keep hiding away who you are/ Remember how we said together we would go far. It could be a love story, it could be about friendship – the lyrics seem comfortingly suitable to multiple interpretations.

When all you have is doubt, know that I’m around/ I will be dying for you, dying for you.

And then Lindsey appears, gathering power with her violin. In those scenes where we don’t see her, we hear her, always, as soon as she starts playing. It’s like straining for something familiar that’s reaching your ears from a distance, and then bam, recognition, this is it! She plays, and oh boy, it’s an explosive, terrifically executed speedy violin frenzy.

The color and light scheme of the music video play up the expected associations with “dying” in the track title – black, grey, beige, brown, switching between what might be a cloudy day outside to darkness, in which Lindsey’s auburn braids dance like flames around her pale, chiselled face while she does her signature twirling.

The theme of an impending mini-apocalypse surrounds the visual aesthetic of the video, but rather than drag the viewer down, it adds a note of raw reality, as well as making you think of destruction clearing the way for creation, like a forest being naturally reborn after a fire.

I will be dying to hear this one again for a long time.