Billy Vera’s blues song “Room With a View” is an awesome record with a really cool music video to go along with it. “Room With A View” is already classic blues standard. Its been performed by legends the world over. But Bill Vera wrote the song alongside Blues legend Lowell Fulson and here Billy Vera himself is performing it in the backdrop of an extremely well crafted and hilarious animated music video, further delineating his plight as the man with “a view of the blues”.
The “Room With a View” music video really enhanced my take on the emotion behind the song. It starts out with a debonair Billy Vera relaxing in a swank animated hotel room, singing the opening lines of his song into the telephone wearing a monogrammed bathrobe. He looks like he’s got it all but suddenly he catches a glance of a Jessica Rabbit-like animated damsel staying across the street. Billy’s character is hit with an immediate longing for what he’s been missing. In fact, this turn of events tells a comically stretched version of the actual development of the song’s name, when Billy Vera saw an actress who lived across the courtyard from him open up all her curtains and walk around her entire apartment in the buff on the night he and Lowell Fulson wrote the song.
“Room With a View” features a playful piano intermingling with powerful brass that complements the picaresque journey Mr. Vera undertakes in this video nicely, a journey which ultimately leads him to a cabaret-style bar where he gets to see his mystery lady pull off some pretty impressive proto-twerk dance moves.
It’s a great song. Ron Yavnieli has done an amazing job directing the “Room With a View” animated Music Video and Billy Vera has coupled that with a wonderful performance on record. Together, they manage to achieve just the right amount of comedy to turn the ostensible anguish laid out in the lyrics into something sad and yet beautiful, into something unmistakably Blues.
– iLikeZach
