I just released a new video from our album The Ghost of John Henry, for the song “The Morning Breaks.” It goes like this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOx2HokCCwg]
This an intensely personal video for me, and I have to be honest it feels a little weird putting it out into the world. The earliest footage in here dates back to 1993, when I was a kid. That’s twenty years of my life in about three minutes, from the first show I ever played (performing Metallica and Pantera songs on a flatbed trailer at a church carnival, right after I started playing drums), through four bands (there have been more, but I don’t have footage of them all), five or six relocations, my transitions from drums to guitar and heavy metal to folk music, and the John Henry recording sessions earlier this year. I was reluctant to tackle this video, too, because I figured it would either come out really honest and evocative…or totally fail and feel wildly self-indulgent. Hopefully it’s more of the former.
This video takes the song in a different direction from its context on the album, but that’s ok. I realized maybe a month ago while visiting my parents that I had all this VHS performance footage dating back to before I could drive a car, and as I dug through old boxes and drawers and rediscovered more footage, I realized that there was a pretty solid chronology hidden away in there that drew a bright line across most of my life. I think the video still fits the theme of the song quite well. We know who we are, but not who we’ll be.
I wish I could speak intelligently about how it felt to go back through all of this footage, but the only thing I consistently felt…was lucky, really.
So, there you go. Now you can watch me grow up. Like the Harry Potter kids.
PS. Thank you to everybody I played with in these bands – Black Spiral (Chris, Ryan), De Profundis (Matthew, Rob, Chris, Robyn), Mission 13 (Chris, Matthew, Karen), and Sci-Fi Romance, today (thanks, Kurt and Jody).