birdwatching
"Visually stunning and at times confronting", Birdwatching is the video for the song on Jont's ninth album "Gentle Warrior". Set in a small Ethiopian village, it is directed by long-time collaborator and UK film-maker, Simon Ratigan, who worked with Jont on the award-winning video "Superstar".
**NOTE: The video contains images of a goat being slaughtered as part of the film-story. Viewer discretion is advised. (Apologies if you saw the film before our more explicit warning went out. It was not our intention to upset anyone.) If you are interested in knowing why this was featured as part of the film, read the various commentaries that follow. Feel free to respond with your own by clicking on the email link at the bottom of the page.
Birdwatching - Watch The Official Video
The Song
BIRDWATCHING
Come find me here
where words disappear
and the world becomes clear
a sky blue appears
Where an eagle floats
right across our screen
where you and I believe
where you and I are free
birdwatching
Let this be known
we've found our home
now it's up to us to find a way
to go through the door each and every day
and make this once found heaven our own
Where an eagle floats
right across our screen
where you and I believe
where you and I concede
birdwatching
Where the forest melts
we're naked as Adam and Eve
not a whisper that isn't true
not a whisper we don't believe
birdwatching
Don't let me go
I've been dreaming of you
I know I don't always see
things as clear as when we're free
birdwatching
Jont - On the Song
"There's nothing to say about this song,
...except that perhaps imagine you are lying on your back in complete stillness.
Perhaps remember the panic and cravings you were feeling for days that all of a sudden dissipated in to stillness
and then you caught that unmistakeable smell of honeysuckle;
Or the open-hearted freedom and joy that tingled through your being and then just now evaporated
and was replaced by a steely hard nail in your spine anxiety;
Perhaps hold that compassion for you
and for others in your life,
As you contemplate how very precious this temporality makes these moments of complete surrender-peace…"
Jont - On the Video
When I first saw this I was spellbound. Director, Simon Ratigan, is an incredible artist and what he has created here elevates this to much more than a commercial "music video".
To me now this feels like a piece you would watch in an art gallery and it would stay with you through the day, and maybe in to the next.
There is a stark beauty…and the very fabric of beauty, meaning, peace and existence is dealt with here, through the intriguing juxtaposition of two very different cultures....
I found something innately true and real here which I had to come back to several times to work out. I hope you find something of value and truth here for you, too.
Upon further reflection…
I see the starkness and viciousness of the goat being slaughtered / compared with the beauty and peace of the other elements of life as relating in some way to the viciousness and cruelty of love, the passing temporality of happiness,....
For me, it's all about dichotomies....that’s for sure.... it’s open and shut, light and dark…there are those elements in both scenes....the scene of the song, which is nothing to do with the scene of the video.....and something about the juxtaposition of these is both suitable and also jarring.....
I find it challenging..... and deep...and it seems to have an ineffable quality a bit more than the sum of its parts....of realness, of truth.....there is no trying to cover up the truth here, either in the song - where the frailties of the narrator's ability to hold on to any of these moments of love is not remotely being hidden from view.... "I know I don't always see, things as clear as when we're free....birdwatching"....or in the video - this is life: there are the streams and the vistas and the monkeys and the laughing children and there are the goats which get slaughtered as part of the life of this functioning, real village, and they are eaten and the people dance and that is the circle of life.
The romance, the love, the connection to the divine that one feels when deeply in that embrace (either physical, romantic or spiritual), it is here and then it is gone, and now we have seen it and felt it, it is our duty to try to go back through that door each and every day... but the reality is that we aren't always in that place. And the reality the symbol of the Ethiopian village gives us, which in realtime is also very much not a symbol, but a real thing we are seeing in utterly authentic documentary footage - the message there is that life is everything, it is ALL the dance, not just the pretty pictures, not just the feeling in love, it is the birth and the slaughter, it is the shadow and the light, it is the heart open and the heart closed.
Simon Ratigan - Director's Commentary
"Birdwatching" Director, Simon Ratigan, offers a short commentary on why he chose to unite this particular song of Jont's with film footage captured while in Ethiopia.
