“Too Close to the Sun” is the new single by Lightwave Empire. Both it and the accompanying video will give listeners reason to celebrate just as the summer season arrives. Despite the track’s inclination toward the positive, vocalist and songwriter Bjarke Niemann recalls that the tune’s initial inspiration was sadness and grief.
“I wrote ‘Too Close to the Sun’ at a time when I felt everyone around me were controlled by anxiety,” he says. “That’s why it’s a song about love and about not letting fear get the best of you. We are all going die at some point anyway, so I’d rather leave this place as a worn out corpse that tried to make the most of it, than a as a prototype, that were never really put in action. I wrote this song for my wife shortly after her mother’s suicide, so I wanted it to be spiritual and cheerful. I wanted the song to encourage her.”
The video concept came quickly to Niemann in a most unexpected way and from an unexpected source. “The idea for the video came one day as I was sitting on a bench on Sønder Boulevard in Copenhagen, where I live,” he says. “I don’t recall the why, but I was emotional and a bit down. From a distance, I saw a boy with Down Syndrome walking in my direction, he was wearing a small backpack, a gold medal around his neck and he had a Coke in his hand. When he saw me, he smiled and came up to me and gave me a hug and said something along the lines of ‘You’re a really good guy’. Instantly, I thought of ‘Too Close to the Sun’. The boy had the same uplifting vibe that the song was meant to have, so I reached out to my childhood friend who teaches at a school for children with Down Syndrome in Copenhagen and together with director Anders Malmberg we shot footage of the kids hanging out at their school.”
Malmberg adds that the shoot was one he won’t soon forget. “It’s a rare experience that I look at the raw footage,” he notes, “and feel that there is an absolute truth and beauty built into the images. In this case, working on this project, that’s exactly how I felt when the processed 16mm film came back from the lab. I was blown away by the pure emotions.” He concludes, “The idea was simply to capture the immediate energy and presence of the children in their everyday environment, their school, and let their personalities comes forward, either through portraits or actions connected to their individual interests or the school facilities.”