By Odeisel

Sam Cohen is an accomplished musician whose work you have probably heard before. He’s played guitar on Shakira’s She-Wolf and on Norah Jones’ The Fall. He’s also part of Alt-Rock band Apollo Sunshine, along with Jesse Gallagher and Jeremy Black. In his spare time he’s got a solo project called Yellowbirds that is turning some heads. The album The Color was released last month.

Cohen is known for some interesting promotions, such as hand screen-printing the covers of his CD’s and making them available only at shows or with the purchase of vinyl. That visual artistry extends to his video creation. For the video to “The Rest Of My Life” from the Yellowbirds project, he spent two months cutting and pasting pictures from books and magazines to piece together imagery to accompany the song. I’ll let Sam tell it:

I made this video between October and December 2010, using a digital still camera and a program for arranging stills into stop motion called istopmotion. The first two weeks were dedicated entirely to cutting out images with an x-acto knife. I filed those images in folders by category and spent the next two months shooting scenes on my desk using a homemade camera stand. The video moves at 15 fps, so it’s comprised of nearly 3,000 individual frames of paper collage.
Much thanks is due to ‘The Thing’ in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, whose second hand books and magazines made this video possible.
Please enjoy and pass it along!
Sam Cohen

The result is a visually stunning work and clearly a labor of love commensurate with a song that reflects the full power of the late 60’s flower power sound. “The Rest Of My Life” recalls The Wonder Years as Cohen stands “trying hard not to think about anything,” presumably faced with the end of his carefree you and forced to confront the rest of his life. At least that’s what I got out of the song. Where are multiple builds that all eventually pay off nicely and the song rocks.

There is a lot of fluff going on in music these days. Mr. Cohen just smacked us not only with a well-crafted song but an intensive and inventive video to accompany it. We probably won’t hear about it at next year’s Grammys, but the Planet supports this artistry 100 percent.  “The Rest Of My Life.”

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