Surprises Want to “Tell the World” (premiere)

Brooks Paschal spent the early aughts as a member of the emo unit Sullivan. These days, he’s working up slightly different musical angle, as evidenced on his new solo release as Surprises, Natural Disaster, due out 31 May via Spartan Records.

The latest single, “Tell World” finds Paschal delivering big, booming choruses, hook-laden verses but with contemporary sensibilities that give the listener a well-intentioned wink and some worldly wit. Just because you’ve hit your 30s doesn’t mean your angst and desire to tell everyone to kiss off has to have died.

Of the video Paschal says, “This was the first music video I made and it came after a few failed ideas I had trying to make a video for another song. Doing it myself, I knew that I had to master the basics of filming and editing. I wanted to make a video that captured the performances but I didn’t want to get ‘Brooks’ fatigue. So the idea was simple, different colors for different performances and back light all of the ‘members’ except for me singing. That created the shadow effect. After I had the shots, it was just a matter of editing it in a way that kept it interesting. My main goal with the video was to capture the energy of the performance without distracting from the message of the song.”