VIDEO: Imaad Wasif Shares 'Fader' Music Video

Acclaimed Los Angeles singer, guitarist, and songwriter IMAAD WASIF today releases a romantic, dreamlike video to his soaring single "Fader." Taken from his sixth studio album So Long Mr. Fear (release date: August 9, 2022 via Sonic Ritual), the "Fader" video is a gorgeously shot mood piece that reflects the graceful beauty of the single.

Amidst scenes of a couple slow dancing while Wasif plays a grand piano, and other visual vignettes, the tilaka painted on his forehead is a cultural reminder of his "personal secular spiritual beliefs." He adds, "The mark is worn as a direct confrontation of a philosophically diametric upbringing: My mother Hindu and my father Muslim."

"I imagine 'Fader' as the song you hear playing inside a piano lounge tucked in a discreet strip mall," director Gillian Garcia says. "Inside you find a hidden world-a mystifying person plays the piano and sings in a corner while a lone couple dance underneath a disco ball."

When creating this single, a song with the spellbinding couplet, "If I die next to you there would be no defeat/Only glory that would shine down on me," Wasif and his collaborators harnessed piano, keyboard and long, moaning guitar notes that drift through the measures. "Fader" also features singer Jen Wood (The Postal Service, Tattle Tale).

Like the first single, So Long Mr. Fear as a whole features Wasif's clear and crisp vocals amid lush instrumental arrangements that belies the album's actual remote recording arrangement.

"We built a tunnel through the goddamned pandemic," Wasif says about tracking most of the album in isolation but in conjunction with producer and long-time collaborator Bobb Bruno of Best Coast. Like songwriting experts such as Lee Hazelwood, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave, on So Long Mr. Fear, Wasif, collaborator Bruno, and mixer GRAMMY®-nominated Lewis Pesacov (Best Coast, Nikki Lane, FIDLAR, Local Natives) unearth big ideas by carving away at smaller things until they glisten with universality.

Tender yet enigmatic vulnerability is reflected effortlessly in the album's ten tracks. Largely acoustic and warmly produced to allow his vocals the space to breathe, So Long Mr. Fear utilizes atmosphere and texture to occupy the same wavelength as rhythm and melody to soaring heights.

For the first time in his guitar-focused recording life, Wasif wrote a lot of So Long Mr. Fear on piano. Yes, his expert use of open-tuned guitars, which add a luxurious, mysterious drone, endures; but the circumstances - forced isolation wrought by the pandemic - afforded him the time to mine new instrumental veins.

Recording most of his master takes while both singing and playing, the aim was to excavate songs without overthinking - relying on what Wasif calls "the simplicity of their compositions - the direct passage into the emotional realms that I feel most at home in."

Watch the new music video here:

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