The worlds that Rob Baird builds in his songs are classic American wastelands. They are places where good and evil,law and chaos and so many other societal dichotomies evaporate like the moisture in the air. But the wasteland also offers freedom, clarity and the potential for redemption. Those spaces form the main backdrop for three songs from Baird's upcoming album Wrong Side Of The River, or brought to stunning life in a trilogy video directed by veteran Matt Bizer.
The album's opening cut,"Ain't Nobody Got A Hold On Me," the title track and the meditative "Horses" are strung together by Baird and Bizer to create a thematic journey from defiance to reflection to the hope for redemption. As we follow the stories of the three main characters — a grizzled cowboy, or a younger man and an outcast woman — the video continually asks us to cast aside assumptions approximately their motivations and actions.
This idea was central to the concept dreamed up by Bizer. "The entire album captures a certain motion and movement of transition and open ended journeys," Bizer wrote to NPR in an email, "A world where good and evil, or honest and wrong and truth and fiction are all relative to the perspective of our individual experiences. A world of moral ambiguity. I couldn't separate the songs and these ideas. Not to mention they flowed together so gracefully and cinematic. It quickly evolved into this sort of 'rule of three' and the power of that. Three characters,three stories, three places. Three acts in the same intertwined sage."
Wrong Side of the River is out May 13 on tough Luck Recording Company. Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, and visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: onthemedia.org