Over at the Okkervil River website there’s a video for the first song from the new Okkervil album The Silver Gymnasium.
The Silver Gymnasium takes place in 1986, in a small town in New Hampshire. For this video, I went down with my friend Johnny North and filmed at the Plainfield NH Town Hall, where a hand-painted backdrop by Maxfield Parrish has sat for decades. The backdrop was created so that it could be lit to simulate different times of day, and in the video Nancy Norwalk – Plainfield’s Head Librarian and one of leaders of a 1990 restoration of the backdrop – takes us through the different lighting schemes, from dawn to nightfall. All those lighting and color changes aren’t computers – that’s Parrish’s painting and Nancy working the over-one-hundred-year-old Kliegl lighting system designed for it.
The song is track one from The Silver Gymnasium, a record we made with John Agnello that I am insanely proud of and that is coming out in September.