XENIA RUBINOS SHARES VIDEO FOR NEW TRACK “DID MY BEST”

New York City artist and singer Xenia Rubinos has shared the cinematic new track “Did My Best” today. Directed by filmmaker and photographer Mario Rubén Carrión, the song’s new video features Rubinos as a woman at a New Year’s Eve party who clearly doesn’t want to be there and is out of touch with everyone celebrating around her. She abandons the party, climbing up to a rooftop where under a sky full of fireworks she prepares to jump off. Things take a surreal turn in a car sequence featuring choreography by Kate Watson Wallace ending on an empty beach boardwalk where she walks into the dark ocean.

“I felt that making this video was my own healing ritual,” Rubinos said. “It’s my wish that this song can be a resting place for somebody’s feelings, that they can feel themselves inside of it and wrap themselves up in it when they need to.”

At the end of 2019 Rubinos had been having a difficult time – an indigenous healer she visited said the problem was “perdida de espiritu” – loss of spirit. Starting to feel slightly better, she began 2020 with daily trips to the studio and re-focused her energy on creating music; suddenly the beat for “Did My Best” came to her.

“This is a song about a sudden loss and wishing to see this person you never got to say goodbye to again,” Rubinos explains. “I remember the moment when I felt I was done singing, it’s like when you cry so hard you forget why you were crying in the first place. As we listened back, the hairs on my arms and legs stood straight up, I felt my face getting hot. I suddenly felt that old familiar feeling. In that moment, in the basement during an eerie quarantine night of fireworks and ambulance sirens I suddenly remembered why I sing.”

Having previously toured with acts as diverse as Battles, Deerhoof, Man Man and Tune-Yards, Rubinos’ energetic live show echoes some of the larger than life icons she admired as a child like Nina Simone and Erykah Badu, while wielding a space in music that is utterly her own. “I think my sound is a collage of different music coming together on a visceral level, connecting the dots with my voice and imagination,” she said.