We are excited to release a music video for “Hymn part 1”, the first track off of our latest album, Hymn, released by Procrastination Records in June 2020!
It was featured by Bob Boilen on All Songs Considered in Janurary 2019, when we first released it as a single with “Punk Jazz” (which also has a video, by Cody Nenninger of Momentum Productions in Baltimore).
A few years ago, I took the photo that was used as the album cover for Hymn, a close up of some beach grass in Southern Maryland, where my parents live. When John and I were deciding what to use for the cover, we were looking through photos I’ve taken and we landed on that one. We edited it and designed the cover together, and really liked the result of the darkened, highly contrasted grass that looks illuminated.
Since last year, we’ve been working with a fantastic video artist team, Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac. They created a stunning video for our song “Uh Huh,” one of our quartet songs with poet/vocalist Dan Gutstein, and they are currently working on a video for “Selfies,” another song from this material. Seeing their work and how well it connected to and added to the music inspired me.
I was thinking of ways to ease into digital animation, and thought about trying to work with just the cover photo. I changed the position and size and used different visual effects to create a choppy looking, morphing animation, and knew this is how the video would start.
If you’ve ever glanced at my Instagram, you know that I cannot stop taking pictures of plants (and our cat, Funz). There is a historic cemetery near where we live in Trenton, and I’ve walked there almost every day since mid-March. And during that time, I’ve taken many, many pictures of plants. So, thinking about the vibe of “Hymn,” and how joyous it is (probably our most “hippy” song, lol) I started taking short videos of grass blowing in the wind, on a few beautiful days in August. I was also able to visit my folks in MD and captured some video of the OG beach grass.
I put all the videos together with the song, but knew it was missing something. I showed it to John and he recommended a few things, the main ones being adding live footage of the band, and using the birds from the first drum fill again—during the drum solo towards the end. I found some footage that we forgot about, from a show (what’s that??) 2 years ago at Sunnyvale in Brooklyn, shot by Stephen Herchen, Zach Herchen’s father. Zach is our guest saxophonist who also did some audio engineering for part of the Hymn album.
Many thanks to John for helping finish up the video, and thanks to Stephen Herchen for letting us use the video of the band. And thank you to Tommy Hambleton again for releasing Hymn. We hope you enjoy this, and please subscribe to our Youtube channel and check out the other videos there. We have some more coming soon that we are really excited about!
