New Video: Norwegian Arms “Wolf Like a Stray Dog”

Today Philly’s Norwegian Arms premiered a new music video for “Wolf Like a Stray Dog,” the title track of the album they released in late 2012. The video stars his father and family dog alone in a large and ornate house, conveying the isolation Mulvihill sings about. He wrote it during his winter teaching in Russia, and in a roundabout way, it talks about how he felt more of a kinship with the stray dogs than he did with the humans around him – because he was still meeting people and learning the language. Here’s what Mulvihill had to say about the song in The Key’s Unlocked series last December:

The way [stray dogs] function in society was interesting – we don’t really have roaming packs of stray dogs in America, so that in itself was a new experience for me. They’re wild, for all intents and purposes they’re feral, but they’re also highly socialized. They have to socialize, they have to function within their pack, and they have to interact with humans to get food. So they’re nice, and people will be friendly to them but at the same time people kind of hate them. And myself, because I was still learning the language, I couldn’t necessarily communicate all my feelings with the people, but I still had to interact with them. And also, there was kind of a cultural thing where I felt slightly isolated. Here, I have been around long enough that I can surround myself with people of a similar mindset. There, it was harder to find people that defined a music scene, or an art scene. Even galleries, or things like that – they hadn’t really developed yet, or if they had, I wasn’t able to locate them in my time there. So I felt I had a hard time communicating with people where we no similar art or music or literary interests.

Check out the video, shot buy Out of Town Films, below.