Les Rav Follows the Light

Lauren Bruno of Les Rav

In the new video from Les Rav, singer Lauren Bruno staggers through a forest – lost, alone, despairing. There she discovers a wooden box in the dirt that transports her to a celestial realm where silhouettes play tug-of-war with her soul and star children bestow her with light. She awakes reborn, with a glimmer of hope to navigate the darkness.

“Keep Following the Light,” the first single from Bruno’s local chamber-pop project since 2012, was born out of miserable sickness.

“I’d been hospitalized for three weeks. I had no strength. I weighed about 80 pounds, and I felt like I was going to die,” recounts Bruno, also in electronic pop duo Slooom, of the time in 2013 when she was laid up with ulcerative colitis. “My friend Naomi Bessette, who directed this video and played the strings on the track, inspired the song. She fed me when I was sick. She took care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself.

“So did Joseph Salazar, who played synths and did arrangements and production on this song. The people who supported me at that time were the light that was keeping me going.”

Bessette’s video, set behind Bruno’s shimmering pleas to the sun and the soul, visualizes the otherworldly realm with the homemade touch of an elementary school play, including a cardboard boat, stars on strings, and copious glitter. Appropriately, the actresses playing the Queen of the Light and her keepers are a few years shy of junior high. Bruno says the children represent the purity of life and the video’s plot symbolizes being lost in a dark part of your consciousness, then finding hope.

“We’re all going to go through hard times, but if we can see anything positive, it can keep us from losing ourselves,” she says. “That’s what this song is about – remembering, even in the darkest of times, that there’s light out there.”