After 3 years in the making, gunshot survivor artist Cousin Dan premieres "Something in the Water" video

After 3 years in the making, gunshot survivor artist Cousin Dan premieres "Something in the Water" video
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Dylan York

In a recent turn of events, absurdist underground electro-pop artist, muralist & gunshot survivor, Cousin Dan, has blown up a new life preserver of sorts, in the sport of rough waters…

Under a hail of bullets, everything changed for Cousin Dan, Atlanta’s favorite leopard-print and mirrored-codpiece-wearing, underground fancy man. He’d been at a secluded bar all night, sending off a lady friend bound for Florida. As he sauntered to his car, a lipstick kiss on each cheek and a slight buzz washing over him, he noticed two figures emerging from the shadows.

“My gut instinct was, ‘This is no good, get the hell out of here.’” As he bolted for the door—pop-pop-pop pop-pop—gunshots rang out into the ATL night. Cousin Dan was hit, but he kept moving. “I’m talking NASCAR pit-crew speed,” he says. “I jump in, lock the door, put my key in the ignition, start the engine, reverse out the parking lot and peel off down the street. The first thing on your mind is, ‘people are trying to kill me,’ you just want to escape. One minute, you’re on your way home to watch some TV, the next minute you’re shot and bleeding.’”

Later, as paramedics strapped him to a gurney, Cousin Dan snapped a selfie and posted it to Instagram. The caption read, “Just got shot, y’all.” “I remember seeing the lights riding in the back of the ambulance and I just started laughing,” he says. “It was surreal.” A bullet went straight through him, in through his back above the hip and out his side. Luckily, there was no major damage and he was released from Grady Hospital the next morning.

When he got home, the revelation came. “I was sitting on the couch, still in my hospital gown, and the gravity of everything hit me—‘If this had been a fatal bullet, and I was dead, I’d be pretty disappointed with what I’d left behind for the world.’ I felt like I had a lot more to offer. That’s where the idea, the spirit of my new single ‘Something in the Water’ came from.”

“We shot it on zero dollars,” Cousin Dan says. “Maybe some money for pizza here and there, but that’s it. A lot of people lent us their time and skills to make it happen. Just to secure the piano, it took me a year of looking, and then it sat in my garage for a year just waiting to be burned. We did the whole thing bit by bit. Sometimes it would be a few months in between. When you’re trying to figure out the logistics for something like this, you just gotta go with the flow.”

Scoggins (Dan’s family name) is well aware of the kitschy absurdity of the alter-ego he’s created, this hyper-sexualized ‘80s-reminiscent future-spectacle, but he still sees Cousin Dan as an extension of himself. “If he wasn’t, I don’t think it would come off the way it does. Cousin Dan is totally inside of me. It’s just an exaggerated part of my personality. It’s separate, but it also feels like me. And it offers the freedom to do whatever the hell you want, which is liberating. I think that’s another reason people are so drawn to what I do.”

Bathed in layers of sparkling synths and anchored by a danceable, hypnotic beat, “Something in the Water” is a disarmingly introspective carpe-diem anthem, Cousin Dan’s alluring falsetto delivering the hook with a simultaneously desperate and self-assured urgency: “I’m tired of being lazy / The time is now / Don’t wait until tomorrow.” It’s a sentiment that might come off as maudlin in the wrong hands, but with Cousin Dan it feels damn-near poignant, connecting in large part because—while Dan approaches his music with complete dedication—he never takes himself too seriously. Exhibit A: the song’s hilariously ambitious video, a clip three years in the making.Check out the video here:

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