Feist’s new music video showcases the tragedy of all relationships


Leslie Feist has released a music video for “The Bad in Each Other,” the album opener for her recent album, Metals. The video was directed by Martin de Thurah and filmed in Mexico.

Feist has described the video as “a symphony of Betweens,” about “all the quiet internal battles that guide our actions, all the hopes and struggles we suppress or let carry us away.”

The film braids several vignettes into one narrative lace which the music traces. While the original song describes one relationship shutting down, this supplemental picture-show barrages us with varied snatches of muddling relations.

The characters here are lonely and in pain. A boy befriends a chicken and watches his new friend roast. A girl hides in the shadows to watch her parents argue. Two guys compete to dance with the same girl and then the winner looks apologetically at his buddy from across the dance-floor. A widower nuzzles his elderly dog as a vet euthanizes the animal.

With these images together, Feist is illuminating one of the most forceful thematic undercurrents of Metals, the tragedy of all relationships—the fact of inevitable separation. Put another way: To be happy we need love, but we get sad when our loves leave us. By necessity, humanity offers itself up to heartbreak. If the storylines here are little battles, the war is a species-wide struggle for connection.