Craig Frank | Look Away / 2016

breaking up is hard to do

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eli Lieb and Steve Grand (composers and performers), Craig Frank (engineer) Look Away / 2016

 

In 2016 open gay pop singers Eli Lieb and Steve Grand came together to perform a song about a gay couple breaking up, not a typical subject in the history of LGBTQ+ popular musical recordings.

     The song was co-written by the performers, and was recorded on the day after Lieb had actually broken up with his current boyfriend. As Lieb has been quote in several sources:

 

“The footage is so real and raw, that I struggled if I even felt comfortable putting it out.

      I wasn’t sure I wanted everyone to see the pain I was in. But then I realized that this pain came from love and is a part of life most people experience at some point – we’ve all been there. I hope it helps remind people that pain and love are so closely related to not forget how powerful love is.”

    Fortunately, as Grand himself notes, the country-western crossover singer is an “irreverent goofball,” which surely helped to balance the painful back-to-back seriousness of the duet, where despite the lyrics, the couple is actually looking off in different directions as they consider both their pasts and futures, now alone from other.

 

Verse 1:

I’ll never touch your body again

We gave it our all, but this is the end

So we say that we tried

Watching you fade, I know it’s goodbye

 

Chorus:

But I can’t look away from you

I can’t look away

I’m trying to face the truth

from the mess that we made

So we say that we tried

But I can’t look away from you

I can’t look away

 

    The video also features the two in the recording studio, with Grand on the piano (Dave Eggar on strings), and the two in various poses around the studio.

     If the music is rather blandly pop, the performance and lyrics make it another break-through in LGBT music videos, particularly in its direct commentary on the touch and smell of another male sharing a bed, not a common subject in popular music.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).