Press "Enter" to skip to content

Premiere: Michael Flynn’s “Get Old”

Last updated on July 10, 2018

Michael Flynn (the Slow Runner one, not the other one) is allowing us to premiere a new video for “Get Old.” I say allowing because I love this video and feel genuinely honored to be the person who gets to premiere it. The song checks a ton of boxes for me: 1. It’s a piano-heavy ballad (check) 2. It’s got great melodies (check) 3. The lyrics are excellent, from a point of view not often heard (check) 4. It’s about parenthood but not in a pacifiers-and-LEGOs way (check) 5. Flynn’s vocal performance is excellent (check).

And then the video. Oh, the video.

When I showed up at work the first day I saw this, I did not expect to spend seven minutes crying at my desk, but that’s what happened. This video demonstrates everything good and right and lovely about family and parenting. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking all at once–on the one hand, this is a big visual list of happy moments of a family and that is to be celebrated. On the other, there are always hard things that don’t get in the videos (I know that as a parent myself). Even deeper than that, there are things in all our pasts and families that hurt us deeply–seeing a montage like this makes me well up with sadness in remembering those things. But then I also well up with happiness, thinking of the good times.

And then the end of the video transitions to Flynn’s daughter, and I lost it. I’d just gone through a catalog of the good and the bad in my own personal history and then, then I had to think, “Oh no, I have a child that looks that tiny and small and I have part of the responsibility of doing the best I can to make sure that someday there are more good things than bad things when my child thinks back on his family.” And right as I was suffering this deep parental existential fear, the lyrics returned and reminded me that Flynn is celebrating this. This is good. This can be good. This will be good.

So if you want all that to happen to you, you can check this out. In other words, the video is really good. Really, really good.

Pretend Like came out May 4. Check it out on Spotify or Bandcamp.