Boston Manor Drop, Sliding Doors
Photo Credit: Megan Doherty
On Thursday April 4th, BOSTON MANOR dropped their second single of the year with a video for "Sliding Doors." This track rides waves of spiking distortion and cuts rich grooves as it goes and portrays the sometimes seismic impact that the seemingly innocuous actions in our day to day lives can have. In a world full or disorder and chaos, all we can do sometimes is respond to what's laid out in front of us. The results may be unpredictable, glorious, or devastating, but as possibility and opportunity present themselves one moment, hide themselves the next, it's how we react at those junctures that leads us on our ultimate pathway. It's a song that in many ways leads right back to the start of Boston Manor.
'Sliding Doors' is named after that movie of the same name. I called it that because when we were writing it I started thinking about all of the decisions that I've made that have led me to the life I have and how circumstantial a lot of it is. It got me thinking about how Boston Manor started. I'd had a few conversations with Dan [Cunniff, bass] and Mike [Cunniff, lead guitar] (who I barely knew at the time) about starting a band. But at that time, I was in art school in a different city and I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I was also starting like two other bands with different people so I figured it was just something that you talk about.
- says singer Henry Cox
"Sliding Doors" is a way for the band to recognize that as we go through life and make more choices, some versions of ourselves die away, and new versions emerge. Who we become may all be down to the roll of a dice.
We tried to reflect this in the music video, the idea being it's loads of different realities, some of which I'm a musician some of which I’m doing something totally different. The diehard fans might recognize the final location, which is where we shot our very first music video, long since scrubbed from the Internet. In a way, the band we're in now feels like an alternate reality to the band we started. I look back at old videos and I barely recognize us!
I'd gone home to visit my parents for the weekend and had taken a bus up to north shore to go and visit a friend, I was on my way home and the bus basically crashed. It wasn't bad; no one was hurt or anything. But I had to get off. It was super late and buses basically stop running at that time in parts of Blackpool. I had been texting Mike and it turned out the bus had crashed at the bottom of his street, so I just went round to his. We basically ended up writing the first song from our demo that night. We played our first show a few weeks later. If that car hadn't pulled out on that bus, we probably never would've started Boston Manor and been all the places we've been. I wouldn't have met my wife and half of my friends. I don't know if I would even be playing music now
- Expanding further, Cox says
