Christina Martin. Photo by Cherakee Andresen.
Christina Martin has released “Storm,” the first single off her forthcoming new album of the same name, which will be released September 1st. She has also released a music video for the song directed by Matt Charlton.
“Storm” is not a pandemic anthem, in fact the origins of the song date all the way back to Hurricane Juan’s devastating arrival in Nova Scotia in 2003. However, hurricane imagery seems especially apt for all of us here in the summer of 2023, as we are both personally and collectively still trying to pick up the pieces of lives that look like a wild storm blew through them. In “Storm” Martin finds herself looking back at a past trauma or upheaval and thanking it for becoming a learning experience that she now has the hindsight to appreciate. “It muddied up and screwed, I sifted through debris, and now appreciate the view,” she sings: a line that feels like it has universal reverberations in this moment.
“Storm” speaks generally to any sort of difficult change we experience in life, whether a breakup or a professional setback, or any challenge that knocks us off our feet. Indeed, it may be too soon for us to look back on the Covid Years with any gratitude for what they have taught us, especially as many of us are still hustling to survive its multifaceted prongs of misery, but I still find the song a beautiful reminder of the sweetness of hindsight, and Martin’s optimism here is refreshing in a world that still feels so incessantly stormy (both literally and figuratively).
I think it’s Charlton’s music video that really brought the pandemic imagery to the forefront for me. The video is filmed at The Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, in black and white, and in a stunning single shot of constant motion. We first see Martin alone in an empty theatre, iconic of the pandemic days, and throughout the video we see her getting ready for an audience, along with musicians Dale Murray (guitar), Ian Bent (piano), Jason Vautour (bass), and Jordi Comstock (drums). In the end the blue performance light, and assumedly the roaring crowd, have returned, and I felt like the pandemic storm had passed. We are left with Martin repeating “Storm, thank you for coming along,” and it did feel for me, in that moment, that better days must be ahead.
Of particular note for theatre audiences, Christina Martin will be joining the Neptune Theatre summer show The Argyle Street Kitchen Party on August 19th at 7:30pm. Tickets are available HERE.
You can Pre-Order Storm HERE. You can view Christina’s upcoming Nova Scotian dates, as well as a slew of European and United Kingdom tour dates HERE. She also has a version of the music video for “Storm” with Audio Description that you can find HERE. Follow Christina on Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, or BandCamp.
