Angelo De Augustine has shared a new song, ‘The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill’, from his forthcoming album Toil and Trouble. Following lead cut ‘Another Universe’, the track is based on the story of Barney and Betty Hill, a couple from New Hampshire who claimed they were abducted by aliens. It arrives with an accompanying video directed by Clara Murray, which you check out below.
“While making the album I endured an experience so horrendous, torturous, and inexplicable that words fail me and explanation seems impossible,” De Augustine shared in a press release. “Within this period, I felt a close connection to Betty and Barney Hill and their story. I even started to believe that perhaps I had been abducted by some kind intergalactic being as they claimed occurred to them fifty-four years ago. When we experience something that doesn’t make logical sense, the mind looks to conjure any explanation no matter how outlandish it appears. We appear to crave understanding. Perhaps it makes us feel safe. The looming presence of the unknown is daunting and sometimes frightening. However, there is much we do not yet understand, some of which we will never comprehend.”
Murray added: “As with any alien abduction story, the case of Betty and Barney Hill left me unsettled, curious, doubtful. I wanted to capture that faltering feeling through repetitive, abstract events—as if the car is moving through time and space until time and space itself degrades around them—the characters, stuck in a loop, ultimately ending up in the same place they began. The setting is eerie, shifting, dreamlike and yet the invasion is corporeal—a haunting within flesh—as described by Barney Hill, ‘Oh those eyes. They’re there in my brain.'”
