Tag: Video premiere

WATCH: The Lovestruck Balladeers, “Rivka Road Rag”

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Artist: The Lovestruck Balladeers
Hometown: New York, Detroit, Chicago
Song: “Rivka Road Rag”
Album: The Lovestruck Balladeers

In Their Words: “We formed a strong bond working with filmmaker Horatio Baltz on our first two videos, which we shot in-person long before the pandemic. Last year, during lockdown, we started talking about a third collaboration. However, given the circumstances, it wasn’t obvious how we would go about it. We were spread out from coast to coast and from Canada down to Mexico, so the idea of a traditional shoot was off the table. After a fresh listen to the album, Horatio pitched us an idea for one of the band’s original compositions, Dalton Ridenhour’s ‘Rivka Road Rag.’ We readily agreed. Months later, when we could sit back and enjoy the final cut, we were all thoroughly charmed. With his artistry, Horatio once again had added a dimension to our music beyond what we’d envisioned ourselves.” — Jacob Sanders, The Lovestruck Balladeers

Photo credit: Aidan Grant

WATCH: Michigan Rattlers, “The Storm”

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Artist: Michigan Rattlers
Hometown: Petoskey, Michigan
Song: “The Storm”
Album: That Kind of Life
Release Date: May 19, 2021
Label: Massasauga Records

In Their Words: “‘The Storm’ was the first song written for this new record, and in a lot of ways it set the tone for the songs that would follow. The storm is a beginning. I wanted to write about that feeling of encountering something that you know will change you forever. ‘It’s hard not to think I was born right there’ is the touchstone line of the song for me. There’s everything before and there’s everything after. As far as the construction of the song, this is a good example of how we were much more deliberate in our approach to arranging and recording this record. The songs on Evergreen are very loosely arranged and we approached those songs in the studio as we had been playing them live. On That Kind of Life, we spent considerable time on arranging and writing our parts. We never played these songs live before recording them which gave us freedom and the ability to really craft these songs in the studio.

“When it came to the video, we wanted to showcase a relationship, but not give away the whole story. We wanted to show snapshots of two people coming together and coming apart, the ebb and flow of a relationship. It feels like you’re waiting for something happen. You’re waiting for that storm to come. And I think when you hear or read the words ‘the storm’ you’re anticipating something bad will happen. But we approached the storm as love itself. Love is everything at once and that’s how I thought of the storm when writing the song and how we wanted to interpret it in the video. The video was directed by Allyson Bernstein, shot by Andrew Gulledge, and assisted by Ramie Cronkhite. It was the first project we did after the height of COVID and was a real collaborative effort.” — Graham Young, Michigan Rattlers

Photo credit: Andrew Gulledge

WATCH: Bendigo Fletcher, “Sugar in the Creek” (Blackacre Barn Session)

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Artist: Bendigo Fletcher
Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Song: “Sugar in the Creek” (Blackacre Barn Session)
Album: Fits of Laughter
Release Date: August 13, 2021
Label: Elektra Records

In Their Words: “Playing ‘Sugar in the Creek’ live feels like floating compared to some of our other songs that probably require more attention to recreate. There are a few key and tempo fluctuations that we sort of arrive at and navigate as the song continues, and we just have to rely on staying in the moment together to hit those transitions naturally. Looking back, I think it was written under the spell of a band called Relatively Clean Rivers, whose only known album consists of those types of songs that just kind of start and end before you remember again that you’re in a human body.” — Ryan Anderson, Bendigo Fletcher

Photo credit: Jimmy Fontaine

WATCH: Turner Cody and the Soldiers of Love, “Lonely Days in Hollywood”

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Artist: Turner Cody and the Soldiers of Love
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “Lonely Days in Hollywood”
Album: Friends in High Places
Release Date: June 4, 2021
Label: Capitane Records

In Their Words: “‘Lonely Days in Hollywood’ is one of the older songs on Friends in High Places. I wrote it years ago at my friend’s house in Paris. After a night of singing traditional Jewish songs, I awoke humming those haunting, cantorial melodies. Eventually, the phrase lonely days in Hollywood appeared out of nowhere. I’d never been to LA, but I conceived the song to be in that noir-ish Raymond Chandler/Day of the Locust vein — a wanderer is on the outskirts of an alluring yet hostile place with a seedy underbelly; a place where promises are broken and dreams of stardom go to die.

“The song is a kind of meditation on the transactional nature of our culture of celebrity; how our dreams belie reality and nothing is for free. The song was originally more up-tempo, but Nicolas Michaux’s arrangement is slower and groovier. He also made a slight change to the chord progression that moved the song away from its klezmer roots. The result is moody and dark and reminiscent of Serge Gainsbourg. This recording came out of a true collaboration. The song travelled a long way from its original form but I love how it turned out.” (Read more below the video.)

“The Capitane Records team dreamt up a truly ambitious plan for the shooting of the video, especially as it turned out to be in the midst of the pandemic. To get the right feel, we needed a location that invoked Los Angeles without necessarily being Los Angeles. Not an easy task. But as it turned out, we had a connection to a photographer on the island of Ibiza who, along with her friends, could provide us the help we needed. And so, after a month of back-and-forth with various embassies, we converged on the island in March.

“Valentine Riccardi (our point person) had already scouted a bunch of locations of out-of-the-way beaches, country roads, old churches, and a beautiful organic farm. As the island was free of tourists due the pandemic, its usually bustling downtown was desolate, providing us the perfect lonely, dystopian backdrop we needed. Valentine’s friend and muse Susana Tartalos played the role of savior and paramour to my down-and-out and wandering cowboy who drifts from hotel room to hitchhiking odyssey to rain-soaked jalopy only to end up at a fire ceremony in the hands of his new companion. Ibiza is a beautiful and enchanted place, whose beaches, seascapes, pastures, and mountain ranges were perfect for the video. Valentine’s friends and their children were like an extended family to us over the two weeks we were there. Like the song, the video was truly a group effort.” — Turner Cody

Photo credit: Charles Paulicevich

WATCH: Charly Lowry & The Heart Collectors, “Navigating to Hope”

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Artist: Charly Lowry & The Heart Collectors
Hometown: Charly Lowry: Pembroke, North Carolina; The Heart Collectors: Hinterland Byron Bay, NSW, Australia
Song: “Navigating to Hope” from Folk Alliance‘s Artists In (Their) Residence program
Release Date: June 1, 2021

In Their Words: “It’s safe to say this global ordeal has proven that no one being has all of the answers; we are all navigating this plane the best way we know how. The Heart Collectors and I find ourselves on opposite sides of planet Earth, navigating to hope. We likened our experiences during this time to being aboard a ship, fighting against Poseidon’s watery fists and underneath dark, ominous skies. We do so with the understanding that we are in this together, and instead of accepting the defeat of a sinking ship, we remain steadfast in our voyage to find our lighthouse, our beacon of hope. This type of imagery was key in the songwriting process and aided us in delivering a message for the downtrodden. Whatever your case may be, we encourage you to seek your peace first, and then move your vessel onward and forward to hope for a new day, season, or way of being.” — Charly Lowry

“Coming together in collaboration from all points on the earth is an extraordinary experience, and one that makes our world so much bigger. Hearing and being present to the stories of people and cultures from one side of the world to another made us see how we literally are all in this together, we have all suffered this at once. Not in our life time has a global experience like this ever been the case, and it brings everything to a level. Things that seemed important became unimportant. The heartbreak of individuals suffering has a profound way of naturally breaking us open to be so much more capable than the usual way of dealing with existence. Finding each other and joining in this online type of creative common room has been the unifying strength to move forward, one step at a time.” — The Heart Collectors

Photo credit: Courtesy of Folk Alliance, Charly Lowry, and the Heart Collectors

WATCH: Dana Sipos, “Breathing Barrel”

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Artist: Dana Sipos
Hometown: Hamilton, ON (currently residing in Victoria, BC)
Song: “Breathing Barrel”
Album: The Astral Plane
Release Date: June 25, 2021
Label: Roaring Girl Records

In Their Words: “‘Breathing Barrel’ is ultimately a meditation on being at peace with the present moment. Written immediately upon returning home to the city from a music residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, deep in the foothills of the Rockies, this song is an attempt to integrate a very powerful experience into the more mundane, everyday life. I was trying to trick or convince myself to ‘be July in the wintertime’ — ‘July’ being the Banff Centre in the middle of a bleak Toronto winter, trying to buoy myself and bring back that feeling of abundance and ripe possibility. So in visiting many landscapes, changing seasons, and fleeting moments while focusing on staying present, ‘Breathing Barrel’ turned into a bit of a dreamscape.

“The video was created by Victoria musician Trevor Lang, with dozens of high-resolution scans of vintage magazine cutouts, finely tuned to line up with the rhythm of the song. The pairing of vintage magazine cutouts with the text made to look as though it was coloured in by hand and was intended to mirror the warm and analog textural quality of the recording, the feeling of paper and pencil. The slightly unusual frame rate of this video (eight frames-per-second as opposed to the typical stop-motion animation of either six or 12 frames-per-second) was intended to give the video a familiar but unique rhythm akin to the drum machine featured throughout the song.” — Dana Sipos

Photo credit: Chris Dufour

WATCH: The Pine Hill Haints, “Satchel Paige Blues” (Live at Standard Deluxe)

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Artist: The Pine Hill Haints
Hometown: Florence, Alabama
Single: “Satchel Paige Blues” (Live at Standard Deluxe)
Album: The Song Companion of a Lonestar Cowboy
Release Date: May 14, 2021
Label: Single Lock Records

Editor’s Note: The Pine Hill Haints have played every edition of the 280 Boogie, the yearly festival hosted by the music venue Standard Deluxe in Waverly, Alabama. This is the festival’s 20th year.

In Their Words: “Satchel Paige was in it to win it. The scouts were gonna come check him out, and it rained. He was dressed in his uniform holding a ball and glove. He was screaming that he wanted to play on the mound. I can totally identify with that. That’s why I wrote the song. It’s a mean blues number and I wrote it because the Haints totally identify with him.

“Growing up, I heard Auburn had the best punk rock scene in Alabama, so that’s where I went to college. My life changed down there when I was in school. Waverly still has a remnant of that scene, to me. It’s one of the first places I started to come to terms with who I was — my country side — and that has nothing to do with cowboy hats and instrumentation. It has something to do with muddy rivers and eagles, and that’s what country really is. That’s Waverly. We played there around a bonfire long before there was a 280 Boogie. People would dance all night. It was special. It still is. If playing at Standard Deluxe is what ‘making it’ is, that’s all I want. Anything beyond that is extra.” — Jamie Barrier

Photo credit: Abraham Rowe

WATCH: Sam Robbins, “Raining Sideways”

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Artist: Sam Robbins
Hometown: Portsmouth, New Hampshire, currently Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Raining Sideways”
Album: Finally Feeling Young
Release Date: May 14, 2021

In Their Words: “‘Raining Sideways’ is one of the songs that means the most to me on the album, and it’s probably the most requested song I get live. It all just sort of came out at once, and it unlocked a new depth in my writing. I had never tried to write a song about my dad, or my relationships to the men in my life. ‘Raining Sideways’ is weird, doesn’t have a real chorus or hook, but that’s what I love about it. It’s just a stream of consciousness song that is one of the most real things I’ve ever written.” — Sam Robbins

Photo credit: Libby Danforth

WATCH: Last Year’s Man, “Still Be Here”

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Artist: Last Year’s Man
Hometown: Eugene, Oregon
Song: “Still Be Here”
Release Date: April 30, 2021

In Their Words: “I wrote this song after a conversation with Ben Allen. Ben is a really fantastic composer and musician who recently started a sync agency in Vancouver, Washington. We talked about me writing something for his company that walked the line between burdened and hopeful and this song is what came almost immediately. I think we’re all eager for life to get back to what it was in some way or another and this is a love song built out of the idea that it will.

“For the video, I spent hours on archive.org not really knowing what I was searching for. It was dumb luck stumbling on these public domain videos from the 1930s and 40s. I started with a clip just to see and the music happened to line up with the dancing for a moment and it felt really beautiful. I pieced it together from there and was surprised by the wide range of emotion I felt from watching people dance in these old movies along with my song. It’s one of those happy accidents.” — Tyler Fortier, Last Year’s Man

Photo credit: Tyler Fortier

WATCH: Rachel Baiman, “No Good Time for Dying”

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Artist: Rachel Baiman with Atwood Quartet and Kyshona
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “No Good Time for Dying”
Album: Cycles
Release Date: June 11, 2021
Label: Signature Sounds

In Their Words: “Of all the songs on the record, this one felt the most cinematic, production-wise. Perhaps because I see this as the real story (of my late grandmother) playing out in my head each time I sing it. That’s why it seemed so fitting to collaborate with Atwood Quartet for this special live version of the song. Ben Plotnick wrote the incredible string parts, which both mimic and enhance the original album production. Kyshona was an artist I thought of immediately for the vocal harmonies, because of the quality of her voice and general spirit as a human. I was really grateful that she was up for it! After a year in which we’ve all had to face so much tragic death, this song feels like a reckoning of sorts, and a moment to process and hope for better in the future. I also want to give a special thanks to my neighbor Mike Malkiewicz for letting us transform and use his beautiful backyard stage.” — Rachel Baiman

Photo credit: Gina Binkley