Video Premiere: Hannah & Maya, “Nothing Else Matters”
In these troubled times music heals, and when the world around us is falling apart sometimes, as Maya de Vitry and Hannah Seng illustrate in this video, nothing else matters but two friends sitting on the porch and playing a song. The beauty of the song and the video is their simplicity: the ringing clarity of de Vitry’s and Seng’s transporting harmonies, Seng’s crystalline banjo picking over de Vitry’ cascading guitar fingerpicking on the instrumental bridges, the ingenious lyricism of the song. De Vitry wrote “Nothing Else Matters” with Phoebe Hunt, and the final lines of each verse call out states of being that reflect the fragility and resilience of human emotional states: “I am loving, nothing else matters”; “I am living, nothing else matters”; “I am weeping, nothing else matters”; “I am singing, nothing else matters”; “I am loving, nothing else matters.” Even in the face of loss, nothing else matters as long as we are feeling deeply, articulating our feelings, and embracing those around us. The spare quality of the video conveys perfectly the depth and beauty of the song.
De Vitry says, “This song is both a love song to another time and a love song to the present. I wrote it with Phoebe Hunt, after a conversation about some grief and longing she was feeling about a fleeting time of musical collaboration, when she was living in a house full of constant music with her bandmates. We wrote it before the pandemic, but it’s become a bit of a tonic to just sing it to myself from time to time in the past year and a half. I have also been wanting to collaborate with my friend Hannah Seng for years, a North Carolina-based painter and musician, and we’ve recently started working up songs together as a duo, so this is a first taste of a new collaboration!”
Instagram: @mayadevitry
Facebook: @mayadevitrymusic
Instagram: @hannahsengart
Facebook: @hannahsengart
