Enveloped in soft-focus sunlight and a gauzy white curtain, Jessica Hernandez holds a bright floral bouquet — you can almost smell its familiar perfume. The Detroit musician is serene in her dreamlike surroundings in this clip for “Break Your Heart,” premiering today on Remezcla.
Also debuting soon is Hernandez’s first child; the news arrived a few weeks ahead of releasing Telephone/Teléfono, she and the Deltas’ Spanish-English double album, last June. Hernandez was on the road at the time.
“Everyone around me had that look in their eyes that said ‘Yikes! No more band I guess!’ But I felt the complete opposite,” Hernandez wrote via email this week. “I decided to keep touring the album and do a five-week tour six months pregnant.”
The initial trepidation quickly subsided to make way for “complete excitement and an insane amount of determination,” she recalls.
“Break Your Heart” opens like the title sequence of an old film — it’s easily fitting for the song, a powerful ballad — but this footage is akin to a documentary, albeit an unconventional one. Post-tour, Hernandez “was on such a high” that she wanted an everlasting reminder of that emotional rush. With no concept but to capture it, she enlisted a friend: director Katie Hollowell.
“I wanted to be able to look at the video 20 years from now with my daughter, and show her how empowered I felt in that moment when I decided I could be a mother and a wife and an artist all at the same time and I didn’t have to choose,” Hernandez wrote.
She’s been documenting her pregnancy in a journal, some of which she shares on social media — but this video is an especially gorgeous, artful memento. The ethereal results are sublime, but even more striking is Hernandez herself; there is an absolute calm about her, and a sense of ultimate strength, too.