Doug wakes up already behind. The room isn’t his, the light’s too sharp, and the first step out the door lands him in a version of the street that seems to have agreed on one thing: he doesn’t belong there.
That’s the entire setup behind Owl Be Damned’s new video, a simple premise that keeps folding in on itself.
“Well I’m feeling so high, hope everything is all right” hangs over it like a bad read of the morning after.
The band—Douglas Thompson on vocals, Joshua Boggs on guitar, Tom Lord on bass, and Ben Johnson on drums—have spent enough time behind bars to know how these stories usually go. They’ve heard them, lived around them, watched them repeat. Here, it stretches into something less literal. “On a larger scale, it represents feeling alone and having to make one’s way through life’s many twisting and turning obstacles.”
Nothing in the video gives Doug a clean exit. He gets shouted at, pelted with whatever’s nearby, met with disgust for reasons that never land. “For no known reason, everyone is angry with Doug! And not just angry but irate!” Johnson says.
“People yell at him, throw things at him, throw up when he passes by, and just generally do not like him.” The goal stays the same the whole time—get home—but every step toward it feels like it’s happening on the wrong clock.
That warped sense of time was there from the start. The band filmed while playing the track at half speed, then snapped it back into place later. Doug drags himself forward while everything else cuts past him.
“It accentuates Doug… trudging through life while the rest of the world flies by around him.” The effect leans into a long-standing fascination with old stunt work and film tricks—Buster Keaton’s physical timing, the elastic pacing of The Gods Must Be Crazy—where speed becomes part of the joke, or the punishment.
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The shoot itself didn’t stay tidy. “There was chaos aplenty,” Johnson says, and the list runs long: whipped cream pies, old fruit and vegetables, condiments, fake barf. Tables flipped mid-shot, bottles scattering, traffic threading through scenes that had to land in one take. People yelling over each other while Doug keeps moving. Some of it was mapped out in advance, some of it wasn’t worth stopping for. “Most of the chaos was planned, but I’m always ready to pivot and adapt at the drop of a hat.”
Control showed up in smaller pockets. One sequence—car, bike, skateboard, scooter, walker—was tightly choreographed and hit exactly as intended. Elsewhere, the sun dictated terms. “The most challenging thing… was the unrelenting San Diego sunshine,” Johnson says. “It was difficult to get the shade just right outdoors, and sometimes the eye is drawn toward a well lit car rather than the action on the screen.” The trade-off stuck. With an all-volunteer cast, time mattered more than perfection. “If something isn’t working I try to pivot to a workable solution.”
Johnson handled production and direction, with Tim Fears on camera and RC Krueger editing the final cut. The rest of the cast pulls from the band’s orbit—friends stepping into a world where everything escalates faster than it should.
The video follows “Barcodes,” directed by Grant Reinero, and both sit under the band’s debut album released in December 2024. Outside the band, Johnson’s been building a parallel run of projects—feature-length work like Fanboy and the nearly finished Find Them, crime-driven “rock and roll thrillers” built around fictional bands whose music is written and performed by the same circle.
Back in the street, Doug doesn’t get a reason, or relief. He just keeps walking.
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