Singled Out: The Small Calamities' Stock Photography

Keavin Wiggins | 04-24-2021

Small Calamities photo courtesy Big Picture Media

SSmall Calamities just released a video for their single "Stock Photography" from their latest album "Moments Of Impact" and to celebrate Charlie Wolf tells us the story behind the song. Here is the story:

Early on in the COVID quarantines I was going through some old moving boxes I had left in a storage unit. This particular box was things that I had packed up in an apartment when I was 21 or so-about seven years ago-and never unpacked. The first thing I found was a shrink-wrapped set of pretty nice picture frames that still had the stock photos of happy families and white picket fences. When I had bought them, I was at a very different place in life, and thought soon I'd be filling them up with memories. Life happened, and I had to move unexpectedly, and the frames never got used.

Seeing these made me reminiscent about the type of life I thought I would be leading right now when I was 21. It got me thinking a lot about how we form these expectations and dreams for how life will go, and how things rarely end up exactly the way we plan. I'm pretty happy with where I am in life, but I'm definitely somewhere very different than the version of me that bought those picture frames long ago thought I would be.

This album was recorded in two "waves" as it were-most of it in spring of 2020, with a few additional tracks added on in October. This was the second to last song we recorded in that first wave, and I laugh a little now when I hear the lyric "the world is ending anyway". It turns out I only had a faint inkling of how much the world would end up ending at the time.

There's a fantastic pop musician out of LA named Coleman Moore who is known among other things for his incredibly energetic dancing at his shows. We asked him to dress up like a stock photo of businessman and come up with an interpretive dance to fit the song. He did a really incredible job of capturing a simultaneously restrained and manic energy that goes really well with the narrative of this track. We're super excited to release this video into the world and get to share this little slice of quarantine poignancy with you.

In case you're wondering, I still haven't put anything in the picture frames. Maybe one day.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here