Billy Lockett & Violet Skies Long For Connection In “Talk” Music Video

Billy Lockett has been clean for six months. The windows through which he now peers are much clearer, and his focus much sharper. With his new EP, Reflections, the UK singer-songwriter takes accountability for a host of problems and finally settles upon a place of contentment. Standout track “Talk,” co-written with duet partner Violet Skies, hones in on a particularly trying time, personally and professionally, and how it took ruin for him to see the light.

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I’m listening whenever you’re ready to talk / And I love you, yeah, you know I’ll always be yours, they sing in unison. But it kills me ’cause you’re not yourself anymore / Still I’m listening whenever you’re ready to talk.

Written nearly two years ago, “Talk” encapsulates how Lockett “just wouldn’t talk to my girlfriend about anything. I kept hiding how bad things were going,” he tells American Songwriter over a recent Zoom call. At the time, he was faced with a tenuous working relationship with his then-label home, Warner Music, and soon “realized how much of a toll that was taking on me.”

Lockett had largely lost creative control over his work, and such turmoil leaked over into his personal life. His girlfriend begged him to talk, but he continued hiding away, pouring his emotions into song. “The best thing to do is to talk about things. It couldn’t be more relevant right now,” he reflects, now fully realizing the weight of a song like “Talk,” which the label called “rubbish and didn’t want to release it. They said that for the last seven or eight songs of mine. 15 million streams later, I like to think I proved them wrong.”

In the accompanying music video, premiering today, Lockett embraces the isolation and loneliness that come from emotional anguish and uncertainty. Long-standing collaborator Alex Rawson (director of photography) worked alongside director Drew Sheridan-Wheeler in bringing the song alive in such a vibrant, emotionally-rattling way. “I put a helluva lot of confidence in Drew. I didn’t really know him that well, and I had never worked with him before. I just completely trusted him. I had a good hunch.”

The clip explodes with fascinating, often peculiar, imagery and a lush, magnetic color palette. Fragmented mirrors play against the song’s smooth melody and structure, allowing the viewer to see reflections as both literal and figurative. “It’s almost like the fractured mirror is my old self and the normal mirror is me now,” he says. Shot “in between the two lockdowns,” the music video was “a nightmare” to film. “We had to jump through all sorts of hoops. The crew was supposed to be 30 people and ended up being me and a cameraman, occasionally. It was an interesting way of doing it really. All the locations we were supposed to have booked ended up being cancelled. We used Drew’s parent’s house, and one of the shots is literally their bedroom.”

The emotional tug-of-war in “Talk” is only scraping the surface. Reflections, out March 19, detonates numerous landmines, all born out personal confrontation and transformation. “I was in this place of always blaming anything but myself,” he says. So he decided to sober up, and the last six months have been the most important of his life.

“I’ve been really learning about myself and how nice it is to be nice. I know that sounds so obvious to most people,” he continues. “I started looking after myself a bit more and now I’m in a much better place. As soon as you stop doing drugs and drinking alcohol, everything sorts itself out. Quitting coke has been the toughest thing I’ve ever gone through. It’s nice to like myself again. I like who I am now, and I’ve been covering that up for 10 years.”

Across six new songs, Lockett seems to find his voice in a way he never expected. He allows himself to expose his pain, admit to his faults, and let it all slide off his shoulders. He soars across Reflections—and the music certainly speaks for itself. “I think these six are the best from all the songs I wrote,” he says. “It’s nice to release them and not just secretly play them for my friends in my kitchen. There’s no such thing as perfect, but this is the best I can possibly do at the moment. I’ve put everything into it. I’m exhausted by how hard it was to reach the bar I’ve set for myself.”

Lockett’s Reflections EP comes on the heels of last year’s Together at Home, his first-ever classical piano album. The first record on which he didn’t sing, Together at Home vaulted to No. 8 on the UK Digital Album chart, and jokingly he didn’t “know whether I should have taken the hint there,” he says with a laugh. Such success was “a shock. It was really done for fun. I was learning how to produce.”

He built a home studio in his cellar, and approached the record as a way of “challenging myself to make an album totally on my own,” he adds. He wrote, produced, and mixed the all-classical record, a primer for his co-producer credits on the new EP. “It was never my intention to be a classical pianist. It was something I enjoyed doing for a little bit.”

In allowing himself to play and experiment, both in songwriting and as a vocalist, he’s found his work shifting quite dramatically. “I’ve always kind of hidden behind writing sad songs. For some reason, I’ve always found it easier. Now that I’m in a good place, I’m writing happier songs, and it’s coming more naturally.”

Lockett has also worked toward “ridding myself of rules” in songwriting. “I’ve been writing with so many writers for so many years, and recently, I have so many barriers, which really shouldn’t exist. Music shouldn’t have rules. I mean, you really shouldn’t have a nine-minute guitar solo, but I’m trying to open my mind again and write like I did when I was 17.

“I’ve learned to stop worrying so much. My job is supposed to be for the love of it and joy of it. You never make good work when you try to make it for someone else,” he continues. “I’ve focused on making music I think is great, and it makes the whole thing a lot simpler. It can so easily become so complicated for no reason.”

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