Photo by Jenna Putnam
Brooklyn based singer/songwriter Fences has premiered a music video for the song “Buffalo Feet.” The video highlights the intimacy found in the track. “Buffalo Feet” is from the singer’s latest EP To The Tall Trembling Trees which is out now via Votiv Music. The video was directed by Ryan Enkema and was show in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. These stunning visuals help bring to the life the closing track to the EP.
“To The Tall Trembling Trees is a flowery metaphor but it also very literal for me,” Mansfield said of the new EP. “It’s a gift to the nervous and the majestic; people I have met, am related to, or even something inside myself. I’m admittedly channeling Whitman but with less bravery.”
Purchase To The Tall Trembling Trees here
Mansfield’s music has always been visual, his words inspire wistful, sometimes nostalgic snapshots; the melodies make them stick. On “Cedar Wesley,” named after his daughter and penned when his partner was pregnant, he sings simply: “Both our lives collided and they caused a new one.” “Like a Feather” he describes as “just a simple love song,” while the EP’s centerpiece “Buffalo Feet,” with its skittering beats and sing-along chorus, offers instant pop appeal. Sometimes the springboard is a phrase lodged in his brain, sometimes it’s a feeling.
Just as Mansfield is an open book in his songs, so too he talks openly about his struggles with anxiety, using alcohol as an anesthetic—a few beers to buoy his confidence so he can perform, so he can make peace with the spot-lit glare. “David Foster Wallace called the brain the great and evil master like how do you silence your mind?” he says by way of explanation. “You sacrifice a bit of your personal life and your health to appear completely relaxed and to do a good show. Now it’s trying to figure out how not to buckle and how not to be emotionally bankrupt.”
Which begs the question why does he continue to do it? What pushes him to create and put himself and his music out there to be loved, yes, but also scrutinized? “Because yesterday I wrote the best song I’ve ever written, I just do that, it’s not really a choice,” he says without missing a beat. “I just talked to Sara [Quin] about this the other day and she’s was like, ‘You could never quit. Even if you painted houses you’d come home and write a song that people need to hear.” I was like, shit, yeah, I can’t really not, that’s totally why: because I just do it.”
