Being stuck at sea has never felt so damn good—possibilities endless and time transcendental. Intricately and precisely merging the natural with the effervescent is 23-year-old California-based singer-songwriter and producer Franny London. The first single from her debut EP Cold Water is an invitation into London’s ethereal mind, transforming water into melody and moving mountains. The single Shipwrecked Boat On Quicksand Beach juxtaposes both the fear and freedom that arises when we give into longing. Feeling terrified and triumphant simultaneously—that is the dichotomy London delicately deconstructs.

“This song for me was really focused around the theme of timing and things not working out on your timetable. Around longing and distance and the illusion of closeness and connection in certain relationships or dynamics.” London tells me over zoom from her home in Los Angeles. Her background filled with sunshine and hundred-year-old trees—it’s clear her affinity to nature is innate. Using ocean waves to illustrate “the spirt of longing and loneliness,” London encapsulates how natural entities illuminate what our subconscious subverts.

Growing up surfing, London’s intimate relationship with the ocean is omnipresent in her tempestuous sound. “The song actually started on the beach when I was living in Connecticut—I was at the bay beach at night in the fall, you know how when it’s so so grey and then the water is grey too? So, it all blurs and you can’t see the difference.” London explains that the journey of Shipwrecked began from a place of color. Looking out at the horizon and seeing only endless, limitless grey, “it’s perfect” London describes.

Giving voice to the intangible, London describes Shipwrecked as “a love song about timing not working out but thinking you can wait around for someone, thinking that that’s enough. That the idea of a future is enough when there’s nothing to actually hold onto… it’s not even the fantasy, it’s just the stories you tell yourself.” London pinpoints the simultaneous torment and jubilee of having a crush that forever ceases to ever come into fruition.

Shipwrecked Boat On Quicksand beach elicits as much soul in songwriting and melody as it does in visuals. Created by London and collaborator Ruby Lanet, the music video is shot in a 360 style that Lanet describes as the perfect medium to juxtapose the song's thematic elements of longing and distance. The cinematography gives “the viewer the illusion of control, the illusion of closeness, the illusion of connection.”

Lanet reflects on collaborating with London, explaining, “The whole experience—from conception to the shoot to the edit, was all about negotiating this relationship with control. I'm used to putting a lot of intention behind every moment in my work, so letting go of the ability to control what the viewer is seeing at any moment—an inherent quality of the 360 experience—was an exciting challenge. But of course, the reality is that there are only a finite amount of viewing experiences that one can create for themselves within the final product, and a finite amount of ways you can move through these California landscapes with Franny. Anything that feels boundless is just a product of not knowing, which is something that the song speaks to and also perfectly sums up my relationship with VR technology.

“When I first started the edit, the endless pool of possibilities felt frightening, but as I learned more about what the medium actually allowed for, I understood what was true all along: there are only so many ways something can go.”

Check out the Flaunt premiere of the Shipwrecked Boat On Quicksand Beach music video below! And grab tickets to see London perform her ethereal and vivacious tunes in person at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn on 10/26 and in LA at Zebulon on 11/17 here.