Exclusive Music Video Premiere: Check Out Smile Smile's Marry a Stranger.
Smile Smile's story is a tale as old as time: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl spurns boy, and boy pens angry songs about girl.
Here, however, is where Smile Smile's story gets thrown trough a loop: As boy (Ryan Hamilton) and girl (Jencey Hirunrusme) were falling in love, they also happened to start a band. And that band got some fast attention courtesy of Josh Venable's popular Sunday night staple, “The Adventure Club” on KDGE-102.1 FM and, later, from local label Kirtland Records who liked the band well enough to sign them to a deal.
So, despite the breakup of their relationship, the band stayed intact.
Unsurprisingly, though, the band's dynamic became rather awkward rather quickly. But it also managed to become strangely alluring, too, and especially in live settings, as the twosome performed together vitriolic songs that Hamilton had penned about Hirunrusme.
These days, however, much of the venom that had spurred the band's first two releases (2006's Blue Roses and 2010's Truth on Tape) has subsided. And the band is promising a change of course for their next release, Marry a Stranger, due out for Kirtland on August 14.
For the first time in the band's career, the new album features a tracklisting of songs penned equally by Hamilton and Hirunrusme. The formula isn't entirely different; the lyrics still lavish in lovelorn territory. It's just that the spew is no longer necessarily directly aimed at other members of the band.
Marry a Stranger's title track, a song about the reservations of falling in love after a heartbreak, stands as a fine example of this sea change. In person, Hamilton and Hirunrusme each now claim that they've moved on from their turbulent past. Hirunrusme even recently became engaged herself.
And perhaps that recently development is what gives the Fabian Aguirre-directed music video for “Marry a Stranger,” which finds Hamilton and Hirunrusme each running away from separate altars before returning to one another, the weight that it carries.
Well, that and the copious local music cameos to be found within the clip. Among the familiar faces you'll see? Roots rocker Kirby Brown, Smile Smile drummer and Homegrown Festival organizer John Solis, Mission to the Sea's Decker Sachse, House of Blues music hall supervisor Rachel Erin Behring, Sarah Jaffe violinist Becki Howard, plus various others.
Thanks to Kirtland Records and Smile Smile for graciously allowing Central Track to debut the clip. Give it a watch below.