Pia Toscano in the video for "You'll Be King."
Two months after Pia Toscano's triumphant solo turn on the American Idol finale, the season 10 fan favorite is unveiling a new video for the song "You'll Be King" in a Billboard exclusive.
Directed by Robert Styles, the clip is stunningly shot in the desert, showcasing Toscano as she clutches a photograph singing "You'll be king of all my empty spaces/all the lonely places" while hunky actor Cody Callahan silently broods on a throne.
"The concept of this video was to really portray and tell the story behind this toxic, dysfunctional relationship that I was once in," Toscano tells Bilboard. "I was in the most vulnerable and insecure place in my life when I wrote this song and I needed to go back to that place and really tap into those emotions for this video."
The piano-driven ballad is a deeply personal one for the 27-year-old Howard Beach, New York native.
"I was all over the place emotionally at this time in my life trying to hold on to something that just couldn't be fixed but I had to be strong enough to pick myself back up and be the one to walk away from it," she says.
To capture the mood of the song, Toscano and her team chose the stark, barren location.
"I always dreamed of shooting in the desert so we went to two different locations on a rainy, gloomy day about 3 hours outside of L.A. and shot this haunting, mystical type of video," she said.
The video was produced by Mason Wehrli and Mark Urbina. Trina Bowman for 4 The Love Ent, LLC, and Wehrli executive produced it.