Jessie Reyez depicts the harrowing experience of losing one’s love to deportation in her potent new song “Far Away.” The track will appear on her forthcoming debut studio album via FMLY/Island, which is due out next year.
In the Peter Huang-directed clip, Reyez dances alone while her partner is seen separately, giving a frightened stare into the camera. As the lyrics unfold, Reyez tells the story of lasting love while her partner waits for his papers. The visual flashes back to the couple happily slow dancing before her partner is violently apprehended in an ICE raid.
“I feel what you feel when you’re far away/When you’re far away,” she sings on the heartfelt chorus. “It’s been a hundred days since I’ve kissed your face.”
While the song details the pain of being ripped apart from one’s love, it’s also a yearning ballad, with Reyez’s sultry singing kindling the flame despite the lovers’ distance.
“Attachment to someone is both something beautiful and something painful. Imagine finally finding your home in another human being but they’re stuck on the other side of this rock we’re all on,” Reyez said in a statement. “You’re left wanting nothing more than a hug — their hug — that simultaneously feels like a pillow and a drug. Somehow when they hurt, you hurt, when they smile, you smile.
“This is love suspended in animation, before it’s tainted by reality (because eventually all hearts break again) but in this moment, neither of you are running from one another — it’s only water and borders and God keeping you apart,” she continued. “Water and borders and God keeping you from home. This is pre-heart break; when both sets of lungs are still working and when you miss them and they miss you back — and you feel each other even when you’re far away.”
“Far Away” follows the release of single “Imported” featuring 6lack and her 2018 EP, Being Human in Public.