Like a lot of people, Paul Schalda’s played in hardcore bands, and he’s played folk-rock, but under the name Paul and the Tall Trees, he’s working a space subtler than the former and more emotionally direct than the latter. Perhaps owing to his time backing the formidable Screaming Eagle of Soul, Charles Bradley, Schalda uses his guitars sparingly, working them into the corners of his songs, tucking them into the gaps in the lyrics.
In “She Comes Around,” whose video we’re premiering today, he bends his lead into what sounds like a Hawaiian take on a mainland hymn. Fittingly, Danny Miller’s clip pulls from similarly nostalgic and distant video stock. Miller’s father was the Abstract Expressionist painter Nachume Miller, and the visuals that accompany “She Comes Around” were made by Miller père as a teenager in Israel, along with other clips from a US road trip. “He manipulated a lot of the footage himself,” Danny Miller says, “painting and scratching the film to create abstractions, splicing it to rearrange the order, and shooting his paintings and sculptures in stop motion to create simple animations.”
You can check out the fruits of both Millers’s work—and, of course, that of Schalda—below.
“She Comes Around” is taken from Our Love in the Light, which is out now via Big Crown.
