#mightybrother

New Orleans band, Mighty Brother, has released their music video “Summer Road” - the second installment of their upcoming double album (The Rabbit. The Owl.), releasing on June 29th. https://youtu.be/b7OqPOSTK0k "Summer Road" presents itself as the perfect addition to any road trip playlist - upbeat, summer-feeling, and laid back all at once. The music video showcases the band on tour, as it takes viewers on the road alongside them with an inside look at their tour across the United States last year. In the midst of the current pandemic, this glimpse into a musician's life brings a sense of nostalgia and longing for things to return to normal.... or at least the music industry. As the band drives across the country the video captures the ‘simple fortunes’ of the open road, juxtaposing the camaraderie and friendships forged with the demands of touring. The music itself captures the band's genre-bending sound of contemporary Folk Americana mixed with upbeat funk elements and instrumentation.  Overall, “Summer Road” beautifully encapsulates those innumerable hours of reflection one might find gazing out the window on any long drive, the mind caught somewhere between going and finding, and leaving and lost.

New Orleans band, Mighty Brother, recently released a music video for their single “Naked Winter” as a tease to their upcoming double album (The Rabbit. The Owl.), due in Summer 2020. "Naked Winter" immediately evokes a feeling of angst and foreboding, establishing the haunting, indie vibes that define the second side of their upcoming double album. The song is a slow-burner, but once the groove drops in, Mighty Brother takes us on a climatic journey, the apex of which features a wailing sax solo and the grittiest bass wah you’ve ever heard. “Naked Winter” captures familiar feelings of isolation, uncertainty about the future, and the feeling of being held hostage by uncontrollable forces such as the media (and, more relatively, the coronavirus), all while artfully exploring the band’s unique genre-bending style. We sat down with Mighty Brother to talk about their band's humble beginnings, new music video, and what's next for the dynamic group.

How did Mighty Brother get started as a band? Mighty Brother began as a duo songwriting project of Nick Huster and Ari Carter in Bloomington, IN, and quickly grew into a five-piece indie rock outfit based out of New Orleans.  We started making music together in 2015. Ari likes to point to a moment after we had first jammed and shared some of our songs that he woke up hiking in Denali National Park, Alaska with one of Nick’s songs stuck in his head as the “aha’ moment for starting the band. After he returned from that hiking trip, we got to work on our first album.   Where does the name 'Mighty Brother' come from? What does it stand for? The name came from “Dearly Beloved,” one of our early co-writes. “Mighty Brother” appears in the lyrics, and we felt it both a strong name and one that hinted at something greater than the sum of its parts. "Naked Winter" is a release from your upcoming double album..... what made you decide to release a double album? Short answer, we’re interested in music that creates an immersive listening experience.  But we could go on… As writers, we both like long-form stories and world-building (think LOTR, Dune, Game of Thrones, etc.), so when we set out to write an album, we hinge on a concept and let that inform what we create. In a listening culture dominated by singles, we just kind of wanted to push back on that.  If you’d like the full story of this particular concept... The Rabbit and the Owl first appeared as characters on the cover of our debut album Jettison. Reprise. We saw them as unlikely friends, predator and prey, the king of the night and jester of the day, and decided to place them on a simple, equal plane. Folks would ask, "So, who is the Rabbit and who is the Owl, and what do they represent?" Over time, the personification of these two contrasting characters grew, as did their stories. Certain tunes became characteristically more "Owl"-esque, while others were clearly the playful and energetic "Rabbit" shining through. Naturally, we ran with it (or took it too far), until a double album became the only clear and viable solution. Thus our upcoming Double Album: The Rabbit. The Owl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEB9ouscstw&feature=emb_title What's your favorite lyrical line in "Naked Winter"? “Yet tarried she along the yawning frozen fringes fair with Venus in her hair…” That line calls back to the moment of the song's conception, as the sun was setting over a frozen lake, and the light sort of just hung there. You could see Venus beaming through the naked branches of the trees along the icy fringes. There was a profound stillness that lives between the lines of that stanza. What I love most about the lyrics and the song format, is how they allude a sense of motion without moving. There is action in the lyrics, the sun is setting, the world is getting colder and darker, but there’s something beautiful about that. The main action is observing this, and we get the sense that no direct action follows, concluding with the words “silence where it sings” where we just want to shout into the void! Musically, the song cycles back on itself and repeats this refrain over and over again, building each time, driving forward each time, but with no real release: motion without moving.  How did the idea for the music video come about? The music video, from concept to shooting, came together in the course of one whirlwind week last December. Ari and I had the idea of making a music video with an analog TV grid and digital mapping but had no idea where to start. When we contacted Bruno Doria and Worklight Pictures to chat about the concept, he revealed that they were, in fact, working on an analog TV installation already and that this would be the perfect push to pull it together. Following that chat, we crafted the video concept and narrative with our director Bruno Doria.  We filmed the video about a week after first contact. Ari and I got together for a whole day and wrote out the narrative and scenes we wanted to capture. The driving themes we wanted to explore were isolation and media feedback cycles / fake news. We wanted to craft this sort of "blind leading the blind" metaphor and how that can escalate and fall apart. In this case it's mute leading the blind leading the tortured and finally (after an epic sax solo) finding some sort of liberation. It's tough times and we need to be really mindful of our bias and our voice and how we treat each other. That's at least what this video means to me, and I'm really proud of how it came out.