Kill Hannah Debuts Video for "Promise Me"

As promised, here is the official word on the official video for Kill Hannah's Promise Me.

Start by viewing the video here: bit.ly/PMvid

In just a few short hours, the video garnered public attention from Nylon Magazine and RockSound, both of which have included the video on their websites, L.A. Ink star, Kat VonD, and ArtistDirect (part of the Rogue Network. In its first day on YouTube the Promise Me video was rated 74th most "liked" and 105th top rated. A pretty huge accomplishment for a video with no budget, no label backing that was created in 48 hours on favors and a dream.

"This was the most ambitious KH video to date, ironically, for the album's least commercial song (though most personal)." (Mat Devine from his Raccoon Society blog, March, 2010)

"Promise Me is the song that, for me, is the most personal song on the [Wake Up the Sleepers] record and one of the most meaningful...when this band started so long ago, I did a lot of indie kind of videos for the band and that was kind of our style back then. Once we started touring and once we got into the machine, videos were one of those things we started delegating to other people. We'd have budgets and we'd have treatments and directors and blah blah blah and to me, I just had this kind of drive to do a video for this song that I hadn't felt since those days when I was in art school making videos for early Kill Hannah songs." (Devine, from "The Making of Promise Me - Part 1 (of 3)")

STATEMENT FROM THE BAND (taken from fuseblog.typepad.com/kill_hannah/):

Promise Me is the most honest, deeply personal song we have ever released. Stylistically, it doesn't fit anywhere on the album, so we put on LAST. It has no drumbeat, no guitar, no bass, and no bombastic "radio-friendly" chorus. It's sparse and eerie and sad.

It was the LAST track anyone at the label ever thought could be a "single". The fans, though, have REFUSED to let it go unnoticed. In the months since Wake Up the Sleepers was released, we've received more heartfelt feedback, worldwide, about Promise Me than ANY other song on the record.

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Many people who only know Kill Hannah from songs like Lips Like Morphine or Kennedy may not realize that the band formed in a college dormroom over a decade ago. At that time, all we had was a tiny core of weird fans, and access to the gear in the Film Dept at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Before we were ever concerned with the politics of record labels, radio or touring, we were recording 10-minute shoegazer-y sound "pieces" and cutting them to grainy, independent art films on Super8. Not only do we look back on those days with a lot of pride, but after 7 years of relentless international touring, we found ourselves NEEDING to get back to that simpler, uncorrupted state of mind:

Promise Me became the perfect excuse.

There was only one problem: The label refused to fund a video. "It doesn't make sense... commercially."

We hung up the phone and called in every favor we possibly could. We assembled a large crew of Chicago's most talented, pyromaniac friends to donate their time-- And over the course of 48 hours we marched all over the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city... without permits.

So, in the end, not only is this my favorite Kill Hannah video for my favorite Kill Hannah song, but it has also become a SYMBOL-- for how, without any help from the "music industry", good people can get together and pull off a wild achievement.

Thank you to all in Chicago who got involved; Those who got cut and bruised and burned, for the sake of friendship...

AND, most of all, THANK YOU to the fans... For reminding us WHO WE ARE, and for refusing to let us take the most predictable path.

Audaci Favet Fortuna

Xo

Mat

This is not a review. Reviewing an endeavor of the heart like Promise Me is better left to individual viewers. It is going to touch each person in a different way, on a different level and to a different extent. My advice to you is simply check out the video and decide for yourself why it breaks your heart.