Rosie Thorne, the project of Mannequin Pussy members Marisa “Missy” Dabice and Max Steen, have released their new single ‘You’re My Future’ (via Epitaph). The track arrives with an accompanying video directed by Dabice that stars “a real life nonbinary trans couple who are also part of the Deaf and CODA (Child of a Deaf Adult) communities,” according to a press release. Watch and listen below.
“I’m so deeply interested in human connection and the ways in which we express ourselves through love,” Dabice commented in a statement. “How we show our devotion and our interest and our intent. There are so many different ways that we use language to demonstrate our love for another person. ‘You’re My Future’ attempts to capture how it feels to realize that the person you are falling in love with may be by your side forever.”
Elaborating on the video, Dabice said:
I wanted to cast and showcase love between two people who are not often represented in media. Early in 2020, when so much of life went fully online – the Deaf community had to continually petition major corporations such as Zoom, Google, Tik Tok, You Tube, Twitch etc to include closed captioning for those in the Deaf community who were not able to participate in so many of our new virtual modes of communication. I imagined how this also related to art, music and visual storytelling and how at a time where many of us were so desperate for human connection, many people were being left out of conversations simply out of an ableist mindset of what it means to make something accessible.
Through friends in Philadelphia I was introduced to Michelle Goodwin, who came on as an editor and producer of this music video. Michelle is a CODA who, along with Blake and D, were consultants on this video. Blake is a Deaf adult and D a CODA. The video was filmed over 3 sunrises and 2 sunsets in Philadelphia, in July 2021. We wanted to make a sweet, romantic, slightly cheesy portrayal of two young people falling in love who we see expressing that love for each other in a language that many people in the world do not speak and have yet to learn. ASL (American Sign Language) has even been described as painting through air and we sought to capture the beauty of both the language and the people who speak it. Happy Pride!
