There is approximately one VHS home video that I am featured in, and it's from sometime in the late ’80s. I'm not 100% sure why my dad rented that video camera, other than that it probably seemed like a pretty cool idea at the time. I haven't seen it in years, but my memories of the tape mostly consist of me teasing my sister and throwing a Big Wheel at my dad as a joke? It's not that home videos don't exist anymore—we've all seen that commercial where the new dad takes all those photos and videos of his baby with his phone and then loses the phone and is bummed until he realizes all that stuff was automatically uploaded to the iCloud or whatever—but there's something about physically having to hold onto that completely unnecessary, constantly degrading VHS tape that holds some romance. Not nostalgia, really, but a sort of romantic race against time and memory. What goes faster? That tape or the clarity of memories of the stuff on the tape? Canyons’ video for "When I See You Again," the gorgeous and sentimental-but-not-overly-sentimental highlight from Keep Your Dreams, is stitched together footage of the band, their friends, their friends in bands, probably some family members, and also some random people that sent in their own footage—but it doesn't come off as piecemeal. Instead, it views like a highlight reel of the last year of a lot of people's lives. It's easy to look at it for the basic surface moments: the beach! a sunset! a rainforest! some surfing! All great, beautiful things that signify fun—but lurking in the lyrics (and even some of the footage) is a sense of sadness and loss and the weird ups and downs of being young and having no idea what you want from life and the people you allow to be part of it. It's not always great times, but if this video says anything, it's that it's probably worth documenting anyway.
