Exclusive Video Premiere: ‘Dancing in My Dreams,’ Alexander Howard

ABOVE: ALEXANDER HOWARD

Our contributors here at Interview are an impressively multihyphenate bunch: in addition to writing and taking photographs for us, they publish memoirs, direct ads, appear in and curate gallery shows—and, as of tonight, they play sold-out Bowery Ballroom shows, too.

Alexander Howard has been writing about fashion for Interview for nearly four years, alongside a burgeoning career as an electropop artist, and tonight he’ll support the wonderful John Newman at the Ballroom—so we figured the timing was perfect to premiere his new video, for the irrepressibly catchy “Dancing in My Dreams,” a song that might put you in mind of Depeche Mode at its best.

“Whenever I sit down at a piano and start writing about loneliness or heartache, chances are the song ends up as downtempo, introspective record—you know, the sort of vibe that’s good to listen to on an empty subway car at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday,” Howard says. “With ‘Dancing In My Dreams,’ I really wanted to write a song about missing someone that felt upbeat and sincere, that captured the feeling of running off a plane trying to get back to that someone as fast as you can! There are two sides to every situation, and I wanted to take the positive sides of that emotion and turn them into my own interpretation of being apart from someone you care about.”  

The video takes the song’s New Wave, bright-lights-big-city sensibility a step further; it finds Howard saying goodbye to all that and hopping a plane from New York to Las Vegas, interspersing footage of the Strip, the showgirls, a firearm depot, some jellyfish, and, of course, Howard himself in a succession of colorful shirts. “Shooting the video was nothing less than insane—the Vegas sequences in particular were absolutely crazy,” Howard says. “Sixteen hours straight of shooting, running from location to location in 110-degree heat, and convincing all these street performers and total strangers to dance with me, was an interesting experience, to say the least! My favorite moment was getting the owner of the gun store to dance to the record—when we walked in there, we had no idea what to expect from a guy in an ‘Infidel’ t shirt. He was very gung-ho about being a part of the video, and had some lethal ‘hands up, ceiling can’t hold us’ moves.”

ALEXANDER HOWARD WILL PLAY THE BOWERY BALLROOM TONIGHT IN SUPPORT OF JOHN NEWMAN. FOR MORE ON THE ARTIST, PLEASE VISIT HIS WEBSITE.