Heaven and Hell. Life and Death. Love and Fear. Felly explores the spaces between these extremes while getting mystical in his new video for “Love and Fear.” In the visual, the singer/rapper sits as an unnamed mystic reads his future through a deck of Tarot cards. With every new card, a scenario plays out on a nearby television as Felly belts out the emotional lines of the song. “Lifestyle left my heart as a souvenir / Round the world leaving parts ’til it’s hard to feel love / I fear the fall off, got f*cking problems / Won’t f*cking cut costs, you know it’s on us / Might fall in love and spend the night.” It’s a captivating video, ripe with subtle imagery – from the noose on his headboard to the butterflies by the television set – and, as Felly EXCLUSIVELY tells HollywoodLife, the video is based on a true story.
“There’s this really magical place called Mostly Angels near my house, and I decided to get a tarot card reading there,” Felly tells HollywoodLife. “The video was largely based on this because the reading really moved me. I was drawing death-related cards that signified an end to a cycle as well as my ‘coming to be’ card was a butterfly. I was spooked to admit that for the past few months, I had been working on a project called Mariposa, which means butterfly in Spanish.”
The whole concept of “Love And Fear” came from “place of exploring duality, sort of walking a tightrope between joy and misery,” says Felly in a statement about the new video. “I had laughed at the nonsense of how I felt at the time. It was like floating in a space between extremes. This song is me exploring that space finding little reminders in the lyrics that things are beautiful, coupled with the confusion over why darkness still looms. The song came together after surrendering to the contrasting emotions.”
This isn’t the first – nor the last – time that Felly has flirted with heavy spiritual themes in his art. In October, he released “Heartstrings,” his collaboration with guitar icon (and fellow “space” man) Carlos Santana. The experience left Felly changed because the “Black Magic Woman” singer gave him “a really cool new perspective on music but also life, and just sort of gave a more spiritual, supernatural aspect to creation rather than just getting in, doing a couple of takes of just running through the motions.”
“I’m open to everything, but music has been what helps me,” Felly told HollywoodLife about branching out into different mediums. “It’s sort of like a spiritual thing, too. It’s like the closer you can get to making really good music, i.e., allowing that to be channeled, allowing the higher energy to be channeled, the closer I feel with a higher power and God and stuff. If you can lock in on that, it feels like church. It feels like you’re in the right pocket, and you’re serving your purpose here on Earth. It feels spiritual, almost.”