Pennsylvania native, now Nashville-based artist Renée Wahl wasn’t always a singer-songwriter. Before beginning a musical career with her band, The Sworn Secrets, she accumulated a few secrets of her own as a captain in the U.S. Air Force assigned to the National Security Agency. Even before then, though, music wasn’t her main identifier — she majored in physics as an undergraduate and scored a Masters degree in aeronautics. Her most recent venture, though, comes back to performing. On her most recent EP, Sworn Secrets, opening track “See You On The Way Down” offers insight into Wahl’s wild life.

Punchy outlaw country with practiced vocals, Wahl herself says the track is about “That one thing, that person, that situation that is ill-fated, but you choose to move forward just the same.” In this way, the track follows a specific trajectory of eerie tones merging into powerhouse vocals singing bittersweet lyrics like “This isn’t gonna end well/Love only feels this good before it all goes straight to Hell”. The constant movement of the music flows in contrast to what’s happening in the music video for “See You On The Way Down” — a stop-motion video created by Deone Jahnke consisting of over 1,000 images, slow images of Wahl performing in slow-motion and a powerful silhouette scene with Wahl and her presumed love interest fade in and out, blending into each other for profound stories, in some cases prolonged and in some cases fleeting, told purely by song.

Watch the stop-motion video for “See You On The Way Down” below and connect with Renée Wahl on Facebook:

–Savannah Davanzo