In today’s Music Video Monday, Sister Lucille‘s Kimberly Dill and Reba Russell are a match made in suffragette heaven. Russell wrote “Why Not You” for the Missouri band’s latest album Tell the World, which she also co-produced alongside Memphis sonic wizard Dawn Hopkins.
The song is all about female empowerment. Director Kim Lloyd took the duetting duo to Beale, where they show off their brass notes and pay a visit to the statue of Black feminist hero Ida B. Wells. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m ready for the matriarchy!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Memphis folk-rock stalwart and MVMfrequentflyerMark Edgar Stuart‘s got a new album coming out called Until We Meet Again. “It’s a quasi-concept album about life, love, and afterlife,” he says.
The lead single, “What’s Louder Than Love?” exemplifies the mood of the record, which Stuart calls “Nothing too heavy, and nothing too personal … My past videos have been melancholy, so this time I wanted to come out swinging with something upbeat and light-hearted. I figured after the past two years we’ve had, who wants to hear more sad shit?”
Bassist Landon Moore directed the video. “It was 100 percent his vision,” says Stuart. “All I did was just walk around Midtown and hang out with some of my favorite Memphis people — mostly those who worked on the record like my two producers Reba Russell and Dawn Hopkins, plus musician pals Will Sexton and Shawn Zorn. There’s tons of great cameos too including Keith Sykes, Jerry Phillips, and Matt Ross-Spang … Making this video was an absolute hoot. My favorite scene is Steve Selvidge and Rod Norwood airing out their Facebook rivalry on camera.”
If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Bruce Newman is the host of WEVL’s “Folk Song Fiesta,” where he brings you deep cuts from the long history of folk and Americana music every Wednesday from 8 to 10 a.m. He’s also a singer/songwriter in his own right, one who has previously graced Music Video Monday with his music, which can touch on the emotional and the political.
His latest song, “Strange Question,” was inspired by the looks he got when he returned to Memphis from the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada with his hair dyed. “It is usually tinted with some color before I go out to Black Rock City,” the attorney and accountant said. “I began to realize if my skin was brown or if I was blind or if you did not like a feature of mine, would you judge me or just accept me? Would you ‘love me for me being me?’ So, accepting me for ‘me being me’ is the gist. What does it matter? And, especially now, it is about acceptance of our brothers and sisters. Let the obvious be clearly understood, that my choice to color my hair is not to be compared with separation based on race or disability or any other factor, but rather a small, personal realization of how we are sometimes unfairly and unkindly separated by differences.”
After the song debuted at Folk Alliance, he put together a band of his Memphis friends — Eric Lewis, Reba Russell, Susan Marshall, Paul Taylor, Gerald Stephens, Heather Trussell, Carrington Trueheart, Sam Shoup, and Kevin Houston — to record it at Music+ Arts. Director Laura Jean Hocking made the music video, which stars the most accepting people of all — kids. Take a look.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Music Video Monday is bringing you all the colors of the rainbow.
Memphis jam band monarchs FreeWorld have been around long enough to know nearly everyone in the Bluff City music scene. The Beale Street stalwarts have spent their pandemic-enforced time off the stage in the studio, says bassist Richard Cushing. “We’ve been in Cotton Row Studio for the past several months working on this amazing project, and we’re all extremely proud of the way it turned out! The end result of all our dedicated work is a city-wide, multi-genre, multi-racial, multi-cultural music video meant to celebrate and exemplify Memphis’ (and the whole world’s, for that matter) diversity, and was created purely as a way to showcase the concept, the lyrics, the voices, the faces, and the overarching idea of diversity as an essential quality of life!”
When I say FreeWorld knows everyone, I mean it. “D-UP (Here’s to Diversity)” boasts a whopping 23 vocalists and 15-member band, including Al Kapone, Hope Clayburn, Marcella Simien, Luther Dickinson, and Blind Mississippi Morris.
Cushing says “D-UP” was originally a FreeWorld tune that the band decided to rework to reflect the lyric’s ideals and celebrate the struggling Memphis music scene. “The song, with lyrics written by David Skypeck and accompanying video produced by Justin Jaggers, came bursting forth with new life through the amazing production talents of Niko Lyras, along with the instrumental and vocal contributions of over three dozen established entertainers, talented newcomers, and legacy artists (see below), who all came together and donated their time and talents to create a work of art that celebrates and exemplifies the musical, cultural, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual unity and diversity inherent in our city and the world beyond.”
Music Video Monday: FreeWorld and Friends
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Bruce Newman is a lawyer and accountant specializing in small business and entertainment law. He’s also the host of Folksong Fiesta, airing Wednesdays at 8 a.m. on WEVL. A true polymath, when he’s not helping his clients navigate the difficult world of the music business, he’s writing songs of his own. Like most people nowadays, Newman is concerned about the state of the world, and in the best folkie tradition, he lays it all out in his new tune “Doing The Best We Can”. It’s a song of protest and solution which urges us all to listen to our better angels.
To help record the song and film the video, he gathered a crew of Memphis all-stars including vocalists Susan Marshall and Reba Russell, James Alexander of the Bar-Kays, blues guitarists Eric Lewis and Doug MacLeod, horn players Art Edmaistan and Marc Franklin, keyboardist Gerald Stephens, and multi-instrumentalist Paul Taylor. Director Laura Jean Hocking combines footage of the musicians taken at Music + Arts Studio with extensive animation to create a lyric video which really gets Newman’s point across. Take a look, then make sure you’re registered to vote.
Music Video Monday: Bruce Newman
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Eric Hughes has been playing on Beale Street for 16 years. But he found his faith in the Bluff City shaken after his guitars were stolen last year. In response, he decided to do what does best—music. He got his friends together and recorded an album. Singers Reba Russell and Susan Marshall, keyboard player Chris Stephenson, saxophonist Art Edmaiston, and trumpeteer Marc Franklin, along with bassist Leo Goff and drummer Brian Aylor, got together to create this tribute to their hometown. The album Meet Me In Memphis was the first project created with the help of the Slim House Front Loan, a program of the Memphis Slim House that provides low-interest loans to fund projects by Memphis musicians.
This Saturday, October 21, Hughes and company will throw a record release party for Meet Me In Memphis at the Warehouse on 36 Patterson Avenue. Here’s the video for the title track, directed by Derrick Curran of Fifth Floor Productions.
Music Video Monday: Eric Hughes
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com
