Gather round young ones and we’ll tell you a tale of a time when television had music channels that actually played music. In the glorious glow of these mythical networks we’d bathe in the discovery of music videos; yes, they weren’t just on YouTube.
Harnessing the beauty of the vintage music video a la living room wood paneling, questionable greens and yellows, and your grandparent’s musky smelling carpet, The March Divide paints a refreshing, yet throw-back, lyric video to “New Me”. The build-up of “New Me” skirts pop, but holds true to the Putnam rock so many have come to appreciate over the years. The arc from verse to chorus to breakdown, like a modern alternative station, brings a little of the 90s, 00s, and today in all the right ways. Blending in the retro room and tube TV sets this apart from the usual lyric video we find.
Jared Putnam wrote the song when he decided he “wasn’t going to sit around and let the apocalypse get the best of [him].” Like most of us in these times, Putnam has had quite a bit of inner-reflection, stating “if my life was a Rocky Movie, ‘New Me’ is the song that’d be playing during the montage, after all the self-destruction stops & the motivation begins, when I’m finally training for the fight.”
While The March Divide may be breaking the ribs of life in the Putnam-montage, we’ll be over here singing along with the anthem of “hell no!/I’ve got to learn to let things go/to free my tethered soul” in the acoustic rock stylings of Texas-based The March Divide.