Last year, we reviewed Ben de la Cour‘s Shadow Land album, a noirish album filled with very personal song writing etched in the ink of turbulence and hope. The album is now set to have a European release on April 9 and it’s one you should definitely check out. To celebrate, Ben has released a video for the album’s title track.
I’m always drawn to little details in videos…throughout Shadow Land, you can’t miss the Warren Zevon & The Patrician Homeboys concert poster – An Acoustic Evening of Ballads, Blues and Broad Sides…from the Fillmore Auditorium 1988. Zevon, alongside Townes Van Zandt, Robert Johnson, Gil Scott-Heron, Judee Sill, Dee Dee Ramone, Janis Joplin, Mickey Newbury and Nina Simone are artists Ben cites on his website as ‘Men and women who sang the truth.’ Like them, all of his songs are very much his own…you only need to listen to the lyrics to work this out..they are written from deep within…he also quotes Carl Jung which is more telling.
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
Ben de La Cour on Shadow Land:
I wrote Shadow Land, the title track off the new album, a few days before I headed to Winnipeg to make the record. I’d only just gotten out of rehab and wasn’t feeling too hot. It was one of those rare songs that came to me really quickly, almost fully-formed. Those are the most mysterious songs of all which in a way makes them the platonic ideal since mystery is probably the greatest thing about songs in the first place. Just like Cotton Eye Joe, nobody knows where they come from.
I remember hearing that Idi Amin had a band that him and his friends played in called the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band. When I started writing Shadow Land I just kind of got the feeling that they’d have to go in there someplace – it made sense in context.
My friend Nicholas Hawley directed the video and we shot it mostly in my living room here in Nashville. Shunda Gardner played my girlfriend, she was amazing. We’re friends and I figured there was no way I could convince her to date me in real life so the next best thing was to get her to agree to play my girlfriend for a day on screen. You take your pleasures where you can find them in this economy. We came up with the concept of a kind of eternal returns situation where you’re trapped in this endless nightmare, which I think fits the song pretty well.
Website: https://www.bendelacour.com/
Photo Credit: Neilson Hubbard