Kheaven Lewandowski | That’s What I Feel About You / 2023 [music video]

an autobiography of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Will Jay, Sam Creighton, Brandon Stansell (songwriters), Kheaven Lewandowski (director) That’s What I Feel About You / 2023 [4.20 minutes] [music video]

In this music video by gay country and western artist Brandon Stansell, he sings about meeting someone after having broken up with his former boyfriend. And in this case the person in the film, Stephen Garrett, is the real-life figure with whom he has fallen in love and about whom he feels frightened and confused for not knowing the full nature of their relationship:

 

But I should have known it’d be on hard on my heart

If somebody asked what I thought from the start

 

It’s a reckless drive

Don’t know if I’m gonna live or die

Kind of crazy staying up all night

Almost nothing I can do

New to the feel of being

Stuck in hell

When you’re gone are you with someone else?

Then you’re here and I can’t help myself

One thing i’m afraid to loose

That’s what I feel about you

 

Without even trying my eyes always find you

One step ahead with your hand right behind you

Reaching for me

You pull me in and suddenly

 

 

I know what they mean when they say that it’s different

Thought i knew love but something was missing

So hard to explain

But the moment that I saw your face

 

     By the time this video was released, however, he was truly in a relationship with Garrett and the following year they became engaged to be married. Their marriage was scheduled for March 2025, but I can find no reports beyond that. I have to presume the marriage occurred and the singer’s fears are now allayed.

     In any event, this song is about his falling love and challenging his now future husband about what their relationship meant to him.

     Throughout, we see Garrett with men, but just as often the “other” is Stansell himself, so was it just his imagination, his fears, or were there actual unreciprocated feelings? The song doesn’t answer that question, but it evidently did have an impact upon their relationship.

      In this work, autobiography and art are definitely interrelated. Stansell himself, in an interview with Tricia Despres in People, admits: “Anyone that knows me, and my music know that I write pretty close to the chest. I write pretty close to personal experience. I always have.”

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2005

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2005).