MSB Shares New Video “A Thousand Times” With Stunning 2D Animation Showcasing A Lifetime of Hellos and Goodbyes

Prolific singer-songwriter Michael Sackler-Berner, aka MSB, will release Short Stories on Feb 22 via CEN/The Orchard, and today shares a heartfelt video for album track “A Thousand Times” – share via YouTube, watch via Billboard.

The poignantly piercing, Leonard Cohenesque lament on doomed romance (“If you don’t leave / You can’t come back for more”) is set to a stirring suite of strings, allowing listeners to grasp MSB’s considerable ability to convey genuine, effective emotional gravity. With the help of filmmaker John David McGrew, the video was made with paper cutouts in 2D animation, beautifully portraying love and friendship that is too powerful to actually break apart, no matter how difficult.

“People we can’t always live with, are sometimes the same people we won’t ever live without,” says MSB. Life can pull people apart, but certain people always return to each other no matter what. That makes for an awful lot of hellos and goodbyes – in the case of this video, a lifetime of them.”

Often the artists that are most enduring and universally revered – think: John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty – are so not just because of their music, but because of their unique ability to tell a story. And time and again, those stories about their lives reveal something to us about our own. MSB has spent the last eight years aspiring to nothing less than such hallowed purpose and it’s led him to what is sure to be remembered as a career-defining moment.

On the intriguingly conceptual new album, MSB has combed through those songwriting moments that have most shaped him, for a resulting collection that incisively captures the evolution of his singular musical talents. Short Stories is destined to become the album that most viscerally and definitively define his talent as an artist and songwriter going forward.

“It’s an album of fully realized Short Stories,” he reiterates by way of the title. “The goal was to let each song lean all the way into whatever style suited it best production wise. But to me…it just sounds like me.”