A Paris-Born Project Turns Humour, Vulnerability, And Collapse Into Cabaret-Style Drama
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Federico Nessi recorded and edited the video for Long Haul
in his Paris apartment, giving Be My Wife’s theatrical world a stage close to home. The Paris-based creative director’s musical alter ego draws on post-punk, no wave, industrial and goth, filtering those influences through a loose, theatrical sensibility. It’s sleazy, romantic, absurd, and genuinely vulnerable all at once.
That tension is the point. Be My Wife lives in the gap between glamour and embarrassment, between confession and performance. Nessi has spent years making images and performing, and that background shows in the project’s theatrical pulse. There’s classic crooner theatricality in the way the voice leans forward, but it’s dragged through a basement of distortion, dry wit, and emotional static. The result feels less like a polished persona than a live wire catching on the curtain.
Long Haul
opens up a new phase for the project, stripping away polish to reveal the personalities hiding under the surface. Written the day after an unexpected LSD trip, it carries the kind of disoriented clarity that only comes when the floor has already moved beneath you. The song plays like a reminder to loosen your grip when life refuses to be managed. Live a little, have some fun, and fade away. That message lands with a wink, but there’s real wisdom in it too.
What makes Be My Wife compelling is the way humour and vulnerability keep trading places. Nessi doesn’t separate the joke from the ache; he lets them sit in the same room. Queerness, in this project, feels less like a slogan than a way of turning the body sideways to the world, finding odd angles where sincerity can survive. The song’s emotional charge comes from that refusal to tidy anything up. It’s messy, but deliberately so.
The self-directed and edited Paris-apartment video sharpens that feeling. Shot in the intimacy of his own space, it turns the room into a stage and the stage into a private breakdown, with all the DIY grit that implies. There’s something fittingly unvarnished about that choice. The project’s interest in things that don’t quite add up finds an outlet in Long Haul
, which embraces that instability rather than smoothing it over.
In a music landscape that often rewards clarity and control, Be My Wife prefers the unstable glamour of contradiction. Long Haul
doesn’t ask for neat interpretation. It sways, smirks, and stumbles forward, carrying its bruises in plain sight. That’s where its power lives.
Photo by Sarah Fineberg
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