golden shadow - music and video
I wrote Golden Shadow a few years ago while on a Buddhist meditation retreat in rural Ontario. During one talk, the teacher spoke about Carl Jung’s concept of the golden shadow — the positive memories and parts of ourselves that are forgotten or overlooked. More specifically, Jung's golden shadow contains the hidden, unclaimed brilliance of positive qualities within us, our light, our gifts, our potential, that we have difficulty feeling or embracing. Supposedly, we unconsciously project it onto others because we feel unworthy, afraid, or unprepared to embody them. This idea transformed into lyrics and the seeds for the song.
Musically, the chords — full of ninths and sevenths — came from an old friend of Simon’s, Shane Rimmer, who’d sent me over some music a while back. Those ninth chords sparked the music and melody for Golden Shadow, and along with the lyrics that had been forming since the retreat, found their way into a song and ultimately our new album, The Paradox of Life Confounds.
The music video, directed and animated by Vered Goldman, builds on that same idea of memory as something alive rather than fixed. Blending live-action cinematography and hand-drawn animation, the film opens on a paper carousel inspired by one near her home in Florence, Italy — echoing the Ferris wheel from The Paradox of Life Confounds album artwork. Shadows cast by hands and light become quiet characters of their own, and images emerge and dissolve much like memory itself, treating light and dark not as opposites but as companions.