See Blitzen Trapper’s Dystopian Video for New Song ‘Wild and Reckless’
Blitzen Trapper find friendship in some strange places in the music video for their new song “Wild and Reckless,” which stars a man in a gas mask gallivanting around with a fake skeleton.
The title track to the Portland band’s new LP, which is due to be released on November 3rd, “Wild and Reckless” is the second song to be previewed from the album, following the first single and lead track, “Rebel.” While “Rebel” set the tone for the dystopian themes of the rest of the album – singer Eric Earley has described it as a companion piece to Blitzen Trapper’s 2008 breakthrough, Furr – “Wild and Reckless” strikes a more optimistic balance, if still tempered by the distortion of nostalgia.
“I originally based ‘Wild and Reckless’ on a family member who eloped at a very young age to Reno. It also has shades of Bonnie and Clyde, but really it’s about the vanity of nostalgia – thinking the past somehow trumps the present, that there were better days somewhere back there,” Earley tells Rolling Stone Country. “Rock & roll being one of the most notorious vehicles for nostalgia, it always seems fitting to toss guitar riffs smack dab in the middle of two lovers in bad straits.”
If the song itself has a darker underlying perspective, the video, directed by Jon Meyer, is both lighthearted and darker still, set in a post-apocalyptic countryside in which that lone traveler stumbles across a skeleton and takes to playing games with it. He later encounters another living human who also wears a gas mask, but both men seem happier to continue on with their skeleton companions.
Drummer Brian Adrian Koch produced the video and tells Rolling Stone Country that he wanted to tap into a time in one’s life “when our horizons seemed to stretch out forever in every direction.” “The video tries to capture that funny feeling of looking back on those times in our lives and laughing at how invincible we felt,” he says. “The barren landscape serves as a perch from which we view the history of our troubled pasts and embrace the memory of what was.”
Born from the band’s involvement in a musical earlier this year, Wild & Reckless is Blizten Trapper’s ninth studio album.