Country lover or not, many can relate to that irksome moment in the past, when upon entering a locale far from the one you generally inhabit; and, at the end of a long day of ______ (enter verb here) you go to grab beer(s), only to find out that, that town is a town that doesn’t indulge in the effects of “liquid courage” and etc. For the unfortunate ones who lived in certain states on the eastern side of the country a few years back, they well, they couldn’t purchase alcohol on Sundays, in the whole state.
To make an already long story short, liquor laws can be a huge impotence on the unknowing traveler. And, the queen of modern-day, down-home country music, Gillian Welch, finally talked about the one fact, or rather tragedy that is a “dry town”.
On Friday, Welch released the new video for the single “Dry Town (Demo)” via NPR, and outside of the universal understanding, and consequential hilarity conceptualized in the song’s lyrics, the musician topped it all off with a rollicking music video. Enter claymation and stop motion, plus a whole lot of amateur-ish illustration here. The video so perfectly engenders how awkward it is to feel infantized. The fast-twitch energy achieved in the almost juvenile qualities of stop-motion film effect past notions of insecurity and restlessness so often described in the universal “teen years”, when every town (when your parents were looking) was a perpetual dry town.
Welch adds, “Dry Town came from a live experience I had on a road trip when I was just out of college. 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. I’m more of a car person than Rachel, so I found the ’71 Buick with the vinyl top, other than that she created every inch of the fantastic world you see.”
Gillian Welch might be the coolest lady in the music industry (and her counterpart, Dave Rawlings, the coolest guy), especially when Johnny Cash is casually dropped into their beginnings. But, alcohol deprivation aside, the video in question comes after the November 2016 release of Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg, and Dry Town, as some may have guessed, is just one of the awesome tracks from the latest record.
