The screen is vertical. The band is squeezed inside it. Another piece of content is waiting for a thumb to stop scrolling. On the official video for Trevor Finlay’s “A Little Too Much,” the smartphone is not simply where the video will be watched. It becomes part of the joke.
Designed to resemble a livestream, the visual places Finlay and his band inside the familiar portrait proportions of a phone while the song circles our appetite for information we never really needed. Breakups. Arguments. Opinions. Somebody else’s outrage. Then another swipe.
There is humor in the contradiction, and Finlay knows it.
“There’s a delicious irony to this song being about the constant bombardment of online information and knowing full well that I’m adding to it,” he says.
The phone becomes part of the composition
Rather than building a conventional performance video around the single, Finlay uses the dimensions and visual habits of social media as part of its language. The band appears confined by the same device responsible for delivering so much of the noise the song is examining.
Finlay directed and edited the video himself, treating the process less as promotional packaging and more as another stage of writing.
“It doesn’t feel that official though because to me it feels like an extension to the song,” he says. “And editing is like a game, you’re unscrambling these visual ideas and then putting together a jigsaw puzzle.”
His long-running interest in cinema also shaped the approach. After spending so much time living inside a song during its creation, he says visual ideas tend to arrive naturally alongside the music.
The result is knowingly self-aware. A song about consuming too much online information has become another thing to consume online.
No lecture, just a few minutes away from the feed
“A Little Too Much” could easily have become a warning about phones, screen time or digital culture. Finlay takes a less severe route. He finds the absurdity in the cycle instead.
There is no demand to disconnect. No finger pointed at the listener. The humor works because Finlay places himself inside the same behavior he is observing.
“People can take away what they want from the song and video, but what I hope to accomplish is to offer a few minutes of joyful distraction and avoidance of whatever else is going on,” he says. “We could all use a break every now and then.”
In practice, those few minutes become the point. The video does not solve information overload. It interrupts it with guitars, rhythm and enough self-awareness to make the interruption feel worthwhile.
A loop pedal enters the studio
The track also marks a technical first for Finlay. Looping has long been part of his acoustic performances, where a loop pedal allows musical fragments to accumulate in real time. On “A Little Too Much,” he brings that process into a studio recording for the first time.
The choice is particularly suited to the subject. Repetition becomes rhythm. A musical idea circles back, accumulates another layer and keeps moving, not unlike the endless behavioral loop of checking, scrolling and reacting that sits underneath the lyric.
What began as a recognizable part of Finlay’s live vocabulary therefore becomes structural rather than ornamental. The loop helps drive the track while quietly echoing its central idea.
Robert K. Wolf remains inside the song
Beneath the wit sits a more personal history. “A Little Too Much” was written with Finlay’s late longtime friend and collaborator Robert K. Wolf, giving the release a second emotional dimension beyond its commentary on digital life.
Wolf’s presence remains embedded in the songwriting. Releasing the track allows that creative partnership to continue in another form, even as Finlay moves into a new period of his career.
That contrast changes the temperature of the song. On the surface, it is playful and quick on its feet. Behind it sits the permanence of a collaboration that can now only continue through recordings left behind.
Three decades in, Finlay keeps changing the frame
“A Little Too Much” follows Finlay’s June 5 single “Shut the Hell Up” and continues a run of releases leading toward his seventh studio album.
The new material arrives after more than three decades spanning songwriting, production, session work and live performance. Along the way, Finlay has shared stages with artists including James Brown, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Chris Isaak and Charlie Daniels.
That history makes the smartphone framing of his latest video particularly effective. The technology has changed dramatically around him, but the job remains recognizable: find a strong musical idea, give it a pulse and connect it to something people understand.
This time, the subject is the device already sitting in nearly everyone’s hand. Finlay holds up the mirror in portrait mode, adds another item to the feed and gives us permission to laugh at ourselves before we scroll again.
Watch and follow Trevor Finlay
Watch the official “A Little Too Much” music video on YouTube. Follow Trevor Finlay through his official website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music.
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