Cassie Morgan & The Lonely Pine and Love Drunk Studio: Behind the "These Years" Video

Cassie Morgan & the Lonely Pine. Photo by Daniel Muller

Update, 4/6/11: Andrew Roger, of Ingrained, put together a mini-documentary on the filming of the video. It's out now; watch below for further contextualization, hott stacking action and track-listening pow-wows.

Cassie Morgan & the Lonely Pine has a brand new song, and it comes with a beautifully shot music video that didn't cost the band a dime. The Hear Nebraska tour, wherein five filmmakers from Nebraska studio Love Drunk are touring the country, shooting live, one take videos for sixteen bands in fifteen cities in thirteen days, made its second stop in St. Louis last week.

"I always enjoy spending time with Cassie and Beth. Their performance, their song, their candor were all wonderful," says Love Drunk's Django Greenblatt-Seay. "No surprise there. Sometimes, I think a community needs someone from the outside to come in and remind them how good their local talent is. Cassie Morgan & the Lonely Pine is really, really good."

Behind The Scenes with Love Drunk and Cassie Morgan from Ingrained on Vimeo.

"I met Django when we were on tour a couple of Summers ago. He was in a couple of different bands at the time (Down With the Ship and Sweet Pea)," says Morgan. "We kept up contact information, and Django called me in November saying that they were doing a video tour of sorts and wanted to come through St. Louis in the late Spring to shoot a live music video of us. It didn't take any persuasion beyond that to agree to the project; a film crew from Omaha wants to come to St. Louis to shoot a video for us, for free? That's a pretty amazing deal for an indie band. Of course as I saw more and more of the videos they were putting out and the level of creativity, quality, attention to detail in each one, I was beyond delighted about getting the chance to work with them."

They shot the video on Saturday, April 30th, in an abandoned warehouse in South St. Louis. The location was up to the band. "We don't fill the songs with walls of sound; we allow for space, and incorporate a certain element sparseness into the arrangements," says Morgan. "A large, open, rickety, rusty, dusty, light-filled space seemed appropriate for our sound, and particularly appropriate for 'These Years.'"

The Love Drunk crew loaded into the warehouse at 2:30 p.m., the shoot was over by 5:30 p.m., and they were on the road to Indianapolis by 6:00. "Django is doing video editing on the road between bands, and he had ours up for private viewing by the wee hours of Monday morning," says Morgan. "So that's like 36 hours from wrap to post, with another video shoot (and I assume some sleeping and eating...though I witnessed neither) in between. It's madness I tell you!"

"The goal behind this tour is to spread the reach of every video and band we have shot and will shoot," says Greenblatt-Seay. "Each time we shoot a new band, fans of that band who watch that video are theoretically one or two clicks away from any other video we have produced. That means, for example, when fans of Arrah & the Ferns (Philadelphia, Penn.) check out the video we shoot of them in Philly, they might stumble upon the video we did with Noah's Ark Was a Spaceship, or the one we did with Conduits.

Cassie Morgan & The Lonely Pine is planning to include "These Years" on an upcoming release, although that album is still in the works. You can see the band at the Homegrown Showcase at the Pageant on May 20th and at Twangfest on June 9th. Watch the video for "These Years" below.