The Nashville rock outfit Willie and the Giant pull off a balance that many lesser rock bands would utterly fumble with: they at once sound like a product of their own time and an earlier one, in this case, the ’70s. Rather than slather their retro-minded brand of southern rock in a layer of pastiche effects (cf. the Black Keys as of late), these guys unfussedly fit the mold of groups like the Allman Brothers and even those a bit later down the timeline, such as the Black Crowes.
This Tennessee quartet will release its debut self-titled LP in April. Below you can watch the psychedelia-tinged video for the Willie and the Giant cut “Loose Ends”.
Singer/guitarist Will Stewart tells PopMatters the following about the music video, “One of the first concerts I ever saw was the Allman Brothers Band in Birmingham when I was 12 years old. I remember being just transfixed by this giant circle behind them on stage that projected all these bizarre psychedelic images throughout the show. Since ‘Loose Ends’ has the full-on Duane Allman/Dickey Betts dual-guitar-harmony sequence at the end, I wanted the video to have those same type of visuals, though at first I didn’t know exactly how we could achieve that.
“Eventually, I reached out to Nashville video guru David Shamban, who’s also worked with the DigDeep Light Show, an all-analog psychedelic light show where they put drops of different color ink onto an overhead projector to create all these crazy light patterns. And that’s how we ended up getting the feel we were looking for on the ‘Loose Ends’ video.”
Willie and the Giant is out 21 April via Cumberland Brothers. You can pre-order it at this link.