Hello Gumption - Spinning As We Go - David Latos

When David and I first started emailing back and forth about a project for Art for Art, David talked about ideas for a new photo or a composite. However, when David emailed me this week with his photograph, it wasn't so much about the final product that he emphasized but the shared experience, the relevance and the feelings that resonated with him. What Dave sent me was a photo he had taken on a flight home from China last year and as he wrote in his email, "although the photograph in my contribution was not a direct result of the song, it may not otherwise have been shared. I think that's just as powerful, or maybe even more so. It brought relevance in one fashion to a piece of art by me that already existed."

Dave chose Hello Gumption as the source of inspiration and here is a little bio of the band, taken from their MySpace page:

"Hello Gumption is the result of a collaboration between song writers David Arcus and Brendan Quinn. The pair met in the summer of 2007 and began writing compositions for television and radio. A handful of these tracks stood out above the others, and since then, have been turned into full length songs. David and Brendan continue to write together, and as their compositions grow and evolve, so does the inevitability that soon they will have a full length album of their strongest work on their hands."

Their song "Spinning As We Go":

I'm going to let Dave take it from here:

This particular song began as a short for an Excel commercial and later turned into a full-length track. I would describe their music as a bit folksy, and the sound screams "road trip" to me (as in this is the kind of upbeat music that I feel like I want to listen to on a road trip). Heck, ignore my description and form your own opinion about it. I don't feel my description does the music justice, anyway. It seems quaint on some levels (though I don't feel that to be a detractor) and extremely deep on others. To me, this song is about a number of things: romantic relationships, adventures between friends, and the journey of all of humanity as we move forward into the future on our little planet.

I chose this particular photograph because I think it does a great job of expressing the depth of each of these types of relationships as well as provide a bit of a literal basis for the lyrics.

David Latos graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a Bachelor of Music. He discovered photography well before university, but it wasn't until he was there that it really began to grow on him. Check out more of his work at his website and read more of his bio at the contributors page.