New Music from Me

New Okkervil River Video: “It Was My Season.”

June 17, 2013
It Was My Season screenshot 2

Over at the Okkervil River website there’s a video for the first song from the new Okkervil album The Silver Gymnasium. I went down and filmed the video last week at the Plainfield 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.

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Lovestreams: There’s Video.

April 16, 2013
LS3 copy

Today I’m putting out a video for another one of the Lovestreams songs. The song is called “There’s Video.” This is a shorter edit of it – maybe at some point in the future I’ll put out the longer version. I did this video with my close friend Scott Coffey, the actor and director. Scott was in a bunch of films including several John Hughes movies and several more David Lynch movies before graduating to directing with Ellie Parker in 2004. He shot this video on an early-generation DV camera, the same camera he’d used for Ellie Parker, and it was already outdated then – with this weird early-digital video quality to the picture that manufacturers have since gotten away from, have improved on. Almost all of the effects are in-camera.

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Lovestreams

January 14, 2013
LOVESTREAMS_620

In the early part of last year I started renting a room down in a basement a couple neighborhoods over from my apartment in Brooklyn and I started going in and working every day of the week there, just shutting the door and writing until evening. I decided to do a project there I’d wanted to do for years and years, which is to make an album by myself and for myself, an album that doesn’t owe anything to music I made before.

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Shock Corridor

January 9, 2013

A life lifted off a news page. A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon. A bus tour through drab poverty. I came over and you offered me the guest room. A lie for a single pageview, courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you. Advice for the heartsick clergyman. The snake in the grass and the ghost at the feast, the jack of all asses and the last of the least are all flown, first-class, to the team retreat. The inventor of anger. The perfector of being distracted when someone is talking to you, but just slightly – super slightly. She said, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t look away from the Shock Corridor.”

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