Editor’s Note: This story that begins, as too many do, with a clown in someone’s DMs and ends with a camera duct-taped to a toy train.
The first thing to know is that Mike Shea tried to make a normal introduction. In his mind, it was a filmmaker reaching out to a musician he admired. In Jonathan Facka’s mind, it was a man in full clown makeup sending him a video at random. Life rarely agrees on the details.
“I messaged Jonathan on Instagram,” Mike said. “I listened to some of his songs, and I was blown away by how talented this guy was, and so I wanted him to think I was talented, so I sent him a recent film I had made, and he left me on read, so I thought, great, that failed. He doesn’t think I’m cool or talented.”
Jonathan remembers it differently. “You sent me a video of yourself singing on guitar in full clown makeup,” he told him. “I didn’t think it was creepy. I just needed to take some time to decide how I was going to respond.” “I got the message,” he said, laughing. “It was something to think about.”
Mike took the silence as rejection. Then Jonathan asked for his email and sent over the demo for “The Light“. “There was a magic to the demo,” Mike said. “I was already blown away, and I was blown away even more.”
Later, when they drifted into talking about Jonathan’s other songs, Mike explained how often he listens to his work. “I listen to Jonathan’s music on my own,” he said. “When I was in Newport Beach, he released a new song, and driving from my hotel to the festival every day, I just blasted it. The car I rented smelled awful, so I had all the windows down, so everybody on the 405 had to listen. It took me seven minutes to get to and from. That was a good three listens, and no one gave me any dirty looks. I guess that’s a good sign that it was a good song.”
Jonathan wrote the song after watching Mike’s earlier film. “I watched his film, and I thought it was really high quality,” he said. “When I see somebody making comedy, I always see… because when you make comedy, there’s some pain behind that. There always is.” He said he “saw right through the comedy and went right to the pain of it all.”
“I ended up making a pretty sad yet hopeful song out of it,” Jonathan explained. “I was completely inspired by the film that I watched… to write my honest interpretation of what the film meant.” He told Mike, “I didn’t laugh, at least out loud.”
The video idea arrived the way these things do: uninvited. Mike was in a coffee shop thinking about the song’s theme of cycles when a looping train popped into his head.
“The song is about being stuck in a cycle,” he said. “I was in a coffee shop, waiting to meet someone, and the idea of a train going around and around just showed up. I thought it would be interesting to shoot the video from the point of view of a toy train. I didn’t realize how hard that would be.”
They shot the video over the span of a year. Mike tied the whole production to his kitchen renovation. “I was getting my kitchen renovated anyway, so I thought, well, let’s shoot around that, because the story starts in the 90s and then ends in the present day,” he said. “Let’s film the first part pre-renovation… then had to wait like six months for that reno to finish, and then film the next two time jumps.” The crew was tiny. “I borrowed the train from my mom. We used my house. I made all the food,” Mike said. “Everyone involved in it… it was a passion project.”
The emotional scenes surprised them. “Eleanor, who played the mom… when she showed up and I told her the breakdown, she started to tear up, and it made me tear up,” Mike said. “It felt genuine. It felt really real.” He added, “Eleanor and I were making each other cry… we were having this staged fight in the kitchen… I had snot dripping down my nose.”
Jonathan had to sit perfectly still through all of it. “I called it the try-not-to-cringe Olympics,” he said. “Crazy things are going on… and I have to keep a straight face and not react.”
There were smaller moments too. Jonathan said a friend pointed out the accordion “sounds like a chugging train,” something he hadn’t noticed. “I didn’t even realize that,” he said. “I didn’t do that on purpose.” And he pushed for a tiny flourish in the Christmas scene. “We put Die Hard on the TV… because I believe Die Hard is a Christmas movie,” he said. “No one would have known unless I said it.”
Once the video was finished, Mike submitted it selectively. “I had to do my research to see what festivals even took music videos,” he said. He was hesitant about Newport Beach. “I submitted anyway, and I talked to the programmers when I was there. I was like, why’d you pick it? And they said, this is good… good music video, good song, good video, good story, and we liked it.”
Since then, they’ve stayed in close contact. Jonathan sends him new material. “I sent him demos of new songs that I’ve written,” Jonathan said. “Mike has heard songs from my new album that’s not even out yet. He’ll listen if I send it to him. Unlike most people who are like, I got a day job or they don’t have time for me… Mike will make time for me.”
Mike didn’t hold back either. “Jonathan won’t call himself a genius because he’s too humble, but I think you are a genius,” he told him. “Your music is incredible… anything I can do to help that process, I am happy to do.”
They’ve already talked about working together again. “Mike brings the comedy and I bring the melancholy, serious sadness,” Jonathan said. “When we riff… something came to be, and it was actually really fast. I would totally be down to make something else.”
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