Luke MacDonald is chasing luma. A multi-hyphenate project defined by introspection, chasing luma explores some of life’s most challenging yet fulfilling themes via beat-driven alternative pop. Balancing the energy of modern electronic music with the wistful nostalgia of contemporary indie music, chasing luma evokes emotion in equal parts through both story-telling and sonic excellence. At once deeply personal and universal to boot, chasing luma makes sincere music that prompts us to seek our own truth.

Luke has always been really into the 2000’s era of pop – born in 1998, his earliest musical memories come from that time. As he was finishing up his new single, “nervous,” he realized how much of the song’s DNA felt like the music from that time, but brought into the modern era of sonics – “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus came to mind when thinking of references.

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically?

I sat down to write this song in early April, and the initial idea came together super quickly. I chose to make a music video for this song because I had such a fun time doing the music video for my previous single “tidal wave” with my close friend Andrew Morgan who has shot both of these videos! He’s so talented and is someone I’ve known for more than half of my life and it feels so comfortable to work with him and to be able to brainstorm new ideas on the spot. My philosophy for making art is to just make the best possible thing you can with the resources you have available to you, because you can do a lot even with an iPhone camera and a good idea. Furthermore, one things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that people see photo/video on social media before they even hear the song, so I’ve been trying my best to put time and care into how things look!

2. What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?

Initially the idea for the video was a lot different actually, but I love how it came together. I originally had the idea to do a whole party scene happening around me, but it didn’t end up making sense and we scrapped that idea. But I wanted to try and display things that induce anxiety in this video due to the contents of the song. Things like clocks, footage that looks like it was taken by a surveillance camera, talking to myself in the mirror, tapping the steeling wheel of a car, etc. I tried to include as much of that imagery as I could find alongside just footage of myself performing the song – there’s not really a narrative thread, but more of just a visualizer that matches the energy of the song.

3. What was the process of making this video?

We started by going downtown in Halifax, Nova Scotia and scouting locations and just shooting a few takes in some locations I had in mind. My personal favourite shot, and the one that took the most time to edit and get right, was the shot with all of the TV’s above me that I manually mapped to I could overlay other video over top (they were playing a basketball game on the TV’s at the time!) I took home the footage from the first day of the shoot and started editing and getting those takes synced up with the song and that gave me a better idea of what we needed to finish the video, so we got together 2 weeks later and went to another few locations – then I edited it from there! I’m a pretty beginner editor in the grand scheme of things but I embrace the DIY energy and when I don’t know the answer to something, I ask friends who are more experienced or quickly enroll myself in “YouTube University” to solve a problem in the process.