“V” Lyric Video & Reaction with Tenneson

Last week we released the latest Territorial lyric video, the intense and dark song “V” by Michael Tenneson, which depicts the remorse and shame Tenneson feels for the victims of his crime. In 1987 Tenneson killed five people in a drug-fueled emotional collapse. With lyrics like "So you think you can imagine the hell inside my heart/The pain and loss I caused so many/Lord It's tearing me apart," Tenneson attempts to shed light on how he feels about the horrific acts he committed.

Shot and edited by Fury Young, this video takes you on a trek of fire and brimstone, self-hatred and inner agony. BL Shirelle got to interview Young and Tenneson in late June, capturing Tenneson’s first reaction to viewing the lyric video. Speaking on the song and his actions, Tenneson had this to say (edited for cohension):

“It’s crazy. Insanity. I can’t even wrap my head around it anymore. I really can’t. But that’s the stuff that happened. When I look at this [lyric video] I see some of these pictures, the young ones when I was a little boy, I think ‘how the hell did I go from that to this?’ And there is a linear progression. I see it today — I see this pattern over and over in my peers [in prison], I see so many of these stories in their eyes. And today the answer is clear — I see where it happened, how it happened, and had I had the right people intervene at the right time in my life, they could have pulled me out of that. They could have showed me, ‘Michael, you’re in a really bad place, you need to turn it around.’ I didn’t have that mentor in my life at the time. So a lot of these guys are just melting down in here, blowing up in their little communities out there, because they don’t have anyone to pull them aside and say, ‘Hey man, wake up! There’s a better way…’

…I’ve spent the past 35 years dealing with these issues day to day, face to face. When they come up I got right at them. I don’t run from the person in my mirror anymore. That’s the thing that’s really changed.”

BL recalled how during a regular DJC meeting between her and Fury, it seemed he was in his “Heath Ledger bag” while knee deep in the editing. In our interview, BL asks Fury what kind of mindset he had to step into in order to complete “V”:

“I felt like I had to do justice to Mike and at the same do injustice to Mike,” Fury responded. “It was like trying really hard to depict him and his crimes and what the song stands for — which is literally five, V, five victims — and do that in a way that didn’t make him look like a rock star, or didn’t make him look cool, didn’t have anything sexy about it — but was still a great video, still an artistic video. And that was extremely hard to do.

Even if Michael Tenneson is a completely different person 35 years later, it doesn’t change the fact that in 1987 these things happened. So it’s not like the fact that i know Mike pretty well now and have worked with him for five years is necessarily comforting, because that stuff still happened, and you’re still trying to make a video to depict the song about specifically those things.”

Watch the video for “V” and BL’s interview with Fury and Michael Tenneson below. So far, we’ve released Parts 1 and 2, look out for the next two coming soon!

7/27/22 Update: Here are the last two installments from the V interview.