Video Premiere: Rayna Gellert, "The Stars"

Videos by American Songwriter

Rayna Gellert is a fiddler best known for her work with the all-female string band Uncle Earl, which also featured singer-songwriter Abigail Washburn. Gellert’s also played with Robyn Hitchcock, Loudon Wainwright III, Sara Watkins, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Tyler Ramsey. Check out the video for “The Stars,” a highlight of her solo album Old Light: Songs of my Childhood And Other Gone Worlds.

It’s a song “about the evanescence of memory, and the way we can idealize a past that is long gone,” Gellert tells American Songwriter. “We have no way of knowing how much of our perception of our own past is accurate and how much is a projection, but the emotions are real either way.”

When it came time to film the video, Gellert, who also performs with her father Dan, kept it all in the family.

“My wonderfully talented brother Matthew Gellert directed it. He used a camera that works well in very low light, a Canon C300, and we did a night shoot near my home in Swannanoa, North Carolina. It was a nearly-full moon, but I’m still amazed by what he was able to capture! I am partial to the images of river cane, because that’s native to where I live — but the little frog is the real star, right?”

See if you agree below.