Here's a little secret that might help you get through a rough patch at some point in the future: when the dark clouds roll in and it all seems pointless, a car can be your best friend. 

The second you slide behind the wheel, you're on the way to embracing the idea that sometimes a change a scenery does a person good. 

If you're going to be sad and confused, better to be listiening to "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Undergound in a car parked on the Stanley Park seawall than in your bedroom with the lights turned off. On that same tip, everything ever released by Joy Division, the Smiths, and Billie Eilish somehow sounds more profound when you're parked on a Cypress Mountain pullout, Vancouver stretched out before you like a glittering diamond carpet. 

Anyone who's ever dealt with the darkness by grabbing the car keys and driven to the edge of nowheere will find lots to love in Sam Lynch's video for "Not My Body". 

Things start out with the Vancouver singer-songwriter sitting behind the wheel of a less-than flashy Honda Civic, alone by the side of a back-country road, the sun coming up over the horizon. That the car is dented in numerous places, and one of the rear lights is burned out somehow catches the world-weary spirit of lyrics like "This is not my body-no they made a mistake/Still every morning I move these arms and these legs".

From there, if you've ever been trapped in a relationship where it's long=past over, get ready to be moved by the sense of desperate isolation. Most notable is the way that "Not My Body" does a lot with a little. Consider the singer staring almost catatonically ahead as she grips the steering wheel to "I try my best to say the things you want me to say/Is it all a mistake". Or when she sits alone in the car in a deserted Chinatown, musing "Can't say for sure the stars understand".

Things pick up in "Not My Body" around the same time the muted percussion and drifting synths give way to gorgeously swollen strings and soaring vocals that go from wounded to defiantly hopeful. 

As the video comes to a close we're faced with the darkness, the Honda parked--headlights on--by the side of an industrial road, empty, with Lynch standing in front of a light fading to black. 

The message? Who knows.... After all, the sad reality is that, sometimes, not even some serious alone time in the car is enough to make it all seem better. 

Sam Lynch opens for Andrew Phelan at the Biltmore on Saturday (June 22).