As absurd as most genre tags are, nothing comes close to the term "singer/songwriter." It can be applied to almost anything, yet is usually a synonym for "dude with an acoustic guitar." So, it's really a disservice to apply it to John Vanderslice, since his music is much bigger than that. He writes songs about small things and specific incidents that resonate on a universal level. The music is often dark and foreboding, but never cold, nor off-putting. Take his new song "White Dove," for example (and by take, I also literally mean take: John and his label Barsuk have it up as a free MP3) . The song is about having a drink with your neighbor who, it turns out, has a daughter who was kidnapped, held for ransom and then killed nonetheless. But it's not even about that, really, it's about coming to terms with the fact that you will never know peace again. It should be a terribly painful song to listen to, but it's not. It's beautiful and ragged and moving. It's territory that most songwriters wish to stake out, but few get this close. And he uses fantastic words like "veranda" and "garroted" while doing it. How cool is that?
In celebration of John Vanderslice's new album Emerald City — in stores on July 24 — Video Static enlisted music video director Brent Chesanek to take us on a "1,2,3" through the three nontraditional videos he's directed for the artist so far: "Exodus Damage," "Trance Manual" and, off the new album, "Time To Go." You can pick the compressed and splotchy YouTube versions, or big and clear Quicktimes. The Quicktime links also have all the production credits, so click on those unless you're connected to the internet with a tin can and a string.
Brent Chesanek, director:
- John Vanderslice "Exodus Damage"
My co-editor Chris Zabriskie and I hadn’t worked together on a project in over four years. But we both love almost everything Vanderslice. Actually, when I first bought my Super 8 camera in 2002, we tested it on a road trip to see Vanderslice. So Chris and I just decided we would team up even though he lived in Olympia, WA, and I in Brooklyn. He shot about six minutes of wonderful footage out West — stuff I could never get here — and then he came to New York to help edit.
We enforced a ten-minute time limit on animating each shot. Chris doesn’t really know much After Effects, so once we locked the cut, his jobs were mainly keeping me under the time limit and drawing pictures on top of our notes. My favorite drawing was a man with a speech bubble saying, "Ask me about our $250,000 Trance Manual concept." Or was it $2.5 million? --> watch "Exodus Damage" in Quicktime or at YouTube - John Vanderslice "Trance Manual"
We didn’t get the $2.5 million we were hoping for, but my DP Jesse Roff and I were excited to shoot on his Beaulieu camera. We shot tests and sent them out of state to a cheap lab/transfer house. The lab sat on the unprocessed film for a week, sat on the transfer for another few days, and after repeated calling finally shipped it overnight at my expense. Then Fed Ex lost the shipment completely. We finally got the film back with one business day left before the shoot, and the main thing we learned from the footage was that Jesse’s camera was broken. This actually isn’t that unique of a story for low-budget filmmaking.
The shoot went well. When I poured a giant cup of Starbucks tea into the bottle on the table (in the opening scenes of the video), Amelia Martin, our actress, asked why her character was drinking tea. I told her it was supposed to be whiskey, but I didn’t have any and didn’t have a chance to pick some up at the store. She loved that and said it was perfect, that she’d be drinking whiskey herself if she was all alone in the dark sitting on a porch with nothing else to do. Yet she was also really sad we didn’t have actual whiskey. She wanted to find a bar to get some. We’d hear "Man, I wish we had some real whiskey," every hour or so. Turns out she doesn’t even drink much whiskey, she’s more of a scotch drinker. --> watch "Trance Manual" in Quicktime or at YouTube - John Vanderslice "Time To Go"
I had my friend Steve Makowski as art director on this one. He took me to places in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, looking for props, eating pizza, and trying to work out some sort of logic for his sets (but I wouldn’t offer him any such logic). A few days before the shoot, I gave Steve a small picture of Plato. If there was any doubt before, he certainly understood then, and worked the whole day on set with that picture in his shirt pocket. Steve did a phenomenal job, as did everyone involved: Jesse, Rebecca, Alex, Mark, and Kevin.
We had a lot of props and we kept them in my apartment. Usually my place is very clean and organized, but throughout this video it was trashed. It made Steve happy. He said it finally looked like I was "busy working on something." I’ve been trying to keep my place a bit messier since. --> watch "Time To Go" in Quicktime or at YouTube
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