Tim Easton’s garage-set video for “They Will Bury You” is as raw as it gets. Homemade and unedited, the video is a single shot of Easton sitting behind a mic, picking at an acoustic guitar and crooning a bluesy, folk-rock tune that sounds like a blast from the past.
Videos by American Songwriter
The video opens with a bit from Easton’s song “Tired and Hungry” ( a live version of the tune from his most recent album Not Cool), and gracelessly transitions to a drum warm-up and an amateur title screen. But once the song starts, the straight-forward, foot-tapping blues melody is pleasantly overwhelming and the rawness of it all suddenly seems fitting.
Album Premiere and Q&A: Tim Easton, Not Cool
“‘They Will Bury You’ is a short film with one chord,” Easton says. “It’s the prodigal son blues song with the inevitable tragedy. The recording itself is me teaching the band the song and it is my favorite track on the album because of JD Simo’s guitar work and how, as the character comes back to meet his death, the guitar also sounds like it is about to croak as the player coaxes a steadily sliding out of tune guitar to finish the song. Â This is what it sounds like when a band cuts a track live and ZERO overdubs are added. Â What you hear is what we actually did at Alex The Great studio that day. Â Outside of Bluegrass or Jazz sessions, this very rarely happens anymore. After we hit that last chord, the band continued to play on, but we already had the band doing that on another track on the album (“Lickety Split”) so we ditched the tag ending.”
See the homemade short film here.
The article has been amended from its original form.
