A new music video for “Dry Town (Demo)” from Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg watch the delightfully animated film using good old fashioned stop motion, a few plastic dolls and some anthropomorphized shot glasses, created by artist Rachel Blumberg.
‘Dry Town’ came from a live experience I had on a road trip when I was just out of college,” says Welch “David and I wrote the song shortly after moving to Nashville, after a show where we opened for Johnny Cash. We were so inspired to meet Johnny and see him in the flesh that we wanted to capture some of that narrative swagger and humor in a song of our own. Since the story is front and center, it seemed like a great chance to bring the song to life with stop motion animation.”
Welch said she gave the toy ’71 Buick featured prominently in the video to animator Rachel Blumberg (a former drummer for The Decemberists and Bright Eyes). It soon became the foundation for the video’s whole aesthetic.
“Gillian had seen [the stop motion sketch comedy] Robot Chicken recently and thusly had the idea in her head of using action figures to tell the story in the song,” says Blumberg. “There were a lot of moments when I was inspired by the rhythm of a line, from the phrasing and melody, about how the characters should move, or what little moment was happening. Besides the music, the lyrics have a great visual quality and rhythm and it made sense to interpret things in a very literal way, which I think adds to the humor of the piece.”
“Dry Town (Demo)” is from Gillian Welch’s Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg,
New album ‘Boots No. 1 – The Official Revival Bootleg’ out now
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