Sometimes a song begs for more. The emotion, the lyric, the tune's raw beating heart lets you know that it deserves a bigger canvas. That's exactly how Imagine Dragons singer Dan Reynolds felt about his band's emotion-packed ballad "Next to Me." He didn't know what visual would fit the song from the Las Vegas group's third album, 2017's Evolve, but he knew it needed something different.
"We put the call out to see what people came back to us with to a bunch of directors, and we like Mark [Pellington] -- he was just the most impassioned director we've ever had reach out about a music video in the history of this band," Reynolds tells Billboard about the legendary director behind iconic music videos from Pearl Jam ("Jeremy") and U2 ("One"), as well as the new all-star drama Nostalgia. "He said, 'You have no options. I must do this video.' And when he heard the song [he said] it had a lot of personal value for him too."
That off-the-bat passion, connection and the gut-punching treatment from Pellington resonated immediately with Reynolds and the rest of the band -- and subsequently became an 11-minute mini-movie. They were all excited, if a bit scared to step outside of their comfort zone to play dramatic roles in the short about fear, desperation, love, harsh consequences and, maybe, redemption.
"Whether it's 'Jeremy' or [Dave Matthews'] 'Gravedigger,' certain songs you hear in your mind and it just starts to race with ideas and this was one of those," Pellington tells Billboard. He describes how the lyrics dug into his bones on an emotional level and led to a voluminous 11-page, abstract treatment in which he didn't try to censor his stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas (a typical music video treatment runs 2-3 pages).
Watch the video here:
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