DRIFTER IN PARADISE: Searching for the Life He Left Behind

A mysterious cowboy searches across an uncertain landscape for something—or someone—he has lost.

An Original Instrumental Work by Marc Soucy

Drifter In Paradise begins somewhere that may not quite be of this world.

Circling clouds, deep space and an almost heavenly atmosphere slowly give way to a pastoral landscape. Then a cowboy appears in silhouette on horseback. He deliberately changes direction, as though something has caught his attention.

Perhaps, after drifting for a very long time, he has finally found somewhere to go.

We don't know much about the Drifter. Even the time in which he exists is uncertain. He might be a man who went to prison, turned to crime or simply abandoned the life he once had and came to regret it.

Or he might already be dead.

I deliberately left those possibilities unanswered.

The music occupies a similarly uncertain world. Although structured much like an instrumental song, it combines drifting synth-wave textures with guitar themes reminiscent of a spaghetti Western. The electronic and Western elements place the Drifter somewhere that doesn't seem to belong entirely to the past or the present.

His journey takes him across a deteriorating wooden bridge that seems to lead...somewhere. Perhaps nowhere.

Then he crosses a beautiful meadow, where we begin to see something he cannot: a woman's hand brushing gently through the plants as she walks.

It's our first glimpse of the person he may have been searching for.

Eventually the Drifter crosses a forest toward a brilliant light. Here the music changes dramatically, with cello and strings carrying him toward what appears to be his destination.

And then the woman emerges from the mist.

Her appearance comes against an extreme close-up of the Drifter's weathered, almost menacing face. I've had women who've seen the video describe him at this point as looking like a “stalker.” But she isn't afraid of him. Quite the opposite. She recognizes him, happily and almost playfully.

And his face changes.

For the first time, it softens into a broad smile.

Only near the end do blurry, dreamlike images of the woman and a child together in a field reveal what the Drifter may really have been searching for all along.

His family. His home. The life he left behind.

As the music fades, the heavenly imagery gradually takes over again.

And we're left with the question that still haunts me most about the piece:

Is the Drifter alive?

Perhaps we've watched a man finally return to his family. Perhaps we've watched a memory or a dream. Or perhaps this is the journey of a spirit trying to reconnect with the people he left behind.

The video doesn't answer that question. I'm glad it doesn't.

The reunion itself is much more human. Whatever has happened to this man, and wherever he actually is, his smile tells us something we can understand:

He has found what he was looking for.

I didn't originally conceive Drifter In Paradise as the beginning of a larger story. That happened later, while I was creating another Western-inspired work called Spirit Trail. About halfway through its production, I began to recognize its solitary cowboy as this same Drifter.

Images from Drifter In Paradise eventually found their way into Spirit Trail—the old wooden bridge, the woman's hand, the mother and child in the field.

But his search would be different the second time.

Instead of trying to recover something he had lost, the Drifter would begin searching within himself.

And that would become the next part of his journey.

Drifter In Paradise
An Original Instrumental Work by Marc Soucy

Beyond The Expected.