Yesterday I released a music video for my song Bottle Rocket. I thought about explaining the shooting of the video & what we did on July 3, 2011, but I think the video itself covers that well enough, so instead I decided to write about where the song and video came from, and why the very existence of the song is an anomaly.
In essence, I started, in my general opinion, in entirely the wrong place creatively: I envisioned the music video before I ever wrote the song.
Let’s rewind back almost a year, to December 31, 2010. I’d just been through what was without doubt the hardest year of my life (there’s no nice way to say it – breaking off an engagement’s a bitch), was in a relationship I desperately wanted to be out of, and as many do at the end of December, was hoping the next year would hold better things. That’s when my roommate Chris brought out the bottle rockets.
As we were lighting them off on my front porch, the tiny payloads of paper, powder, cardboard and wood became something symbolic to me. As I touched the flame to each fuse, I pictured that the rocket represented something in my life that I was holding onto – a painful memory, a plan that would never happen, a fear that I couldn’t move forward, or a regret for something I’d done. As they flew off into the night sky and burst one by one, I felt a physical lightening, as if little weights were being lifted off me.
When you experience something like that, you have to share it. For the next few weeks I walked around with a developing story in my mind – a group of people writing the things they wished to be rid of on slips of paper, taping them to bottle rockets and setting them off – and I realized that this was a perfect concept for a music video.
There was only one problem: I had no song in my catalog to pair it with.
Most songwriters have a standard way in which they create their songs, which varies widely from person to person. In almost all cases, I begin with a vocal melody, usually with one key phrase paired with it, that becomes the musical and conceptual heart of the song. Starting instead with a fully-developed visual story as the basis for a song was an entirely new way of writing for me, and if I’m being honest, a huge challenge. I spent the better part of two months writing and re-writing the lyrics – it was, in fact, an 11th hour addition to my album Waking Up Is A Letdown.
Once the song was finished… well, all that was left to do was throw one hell of a party.
