Clara Joy – “Find Things Beautiful” (Video Premiere)

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The second single from Clara Joy and her upcoming new album, What We Have Now, is called “Find Things Beautiful” and is a song about the difference between our emotions and tangible items. Clara Joy shared, “The song was written from the perspective of someone who is confessing to a psychotic break due to the separation they feel between their emotional world and the material world. The ‘material world’ in this song was inspired by downtown Manhattan culture over the last several years, addressing the city’s need to constantly posture itself as entertaining rather than truly culturally engaging.” With a great vision for her music, Clara Joy is a key artist to watch. If you’re enjoying the music video, please consider pre-ordering What We Have Now, that will be released on May 23rd via Shimmy-Disc here.

“Find Things Beautiful” dives into the tension between emotional reality and the material world. What inspired you to explore that dissonance in such a raw and confessional way?

I felt alienated from what was happening around me culturally when I wrote this song, so my environment influenced my emotional world and the song developed out of that experience.

The video for “Find Things Beautiful” features you vacuuming Dimes Square—a bold and symbolic visual. Can you walk us through how that idea came together and what you hoped to express with it?

Myself and Su Koko had done an intervention where we vacuumed pages from a book and then emptied the vacuum and read the text aloud at a reading series in dimes square a while back. I had been obsessed with the idea of using a vacuum as a performance piece tool for a long time. We wanted to intervene some kind of dimes square’s cultural symbol in combination with New York’s tourist culture and how they relate to one another. We decided, myself and Su Koko who made the music video, that vacuuming the Brooklyn bridge and dimes square was a way of intervening the expectations of how to behave in the city’s social and cultural architecture – so we literally filmed me vacuuming the architecture.

The album was created at home over four years. How did the evolution of the songs mirror what you were going through personally between 2020 and 2024?

It was a hard time for me socially and emotionally in NYC from 2020-2022. The songs started with being about people feeling alienated in their social environments, stories of characters I had met during the pandemic when I would visit Washington square park to get a break from the isolation and growing up. The album also addresses neoliberalism’s role in creating a socially acceptable paralyzation of the self, and the coping mechanisms this produces.

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