Over the summer, singer-songwriter Lawrence Rothman unleashed their pandemic-era opus Good Morning, America, which both served as an outlet for the artist’s anxieties of the era and provided further evidence of Rothman’s wide-ranging connections within music, with Lucinda Williams, Amanda Shires, Girlpool, Son Little, Caroline Rose, Mary Lattimore, and more appearing on the project. “Glory,” the album track which features harmonies from Nashville-based songwriter Katie Pruitt, is getting a video treatment today courtesy of filmmaker Mary Rozzi, which emphasizes both the sense of isolation that inspired the record’s lyrics and the blazing desert setting the track was conceived in. Filmed in Pioneertown, California, the visual intercuts scenes from the desert with close-ups of Rothman’s not-entirely-un-Jagger-like physique in a blank void as it enters a state of Performance-esque psychedelia.
“Though many artists won’t admit it, we first write from a place of pain or joy or some triggered emotion,” Rothman explains, providing context for the song and video, “but we record it and release it to the public for validation and stroking of the ego. Mortality and appreciation of being alive was more magnified during last summer’s lock down. Our lives can be taken so fast and unexpectedly. This was what I wrote about in the song and the video displays the isolation I felt during a very hard year, but also celebrates the idea of being a wanderer and exploring inside your own head uninterrupted. You can confront the good and the bad about yourself without the noise of others.”
“‘Glory’ is a beautiful track and one that resonates with me personally on such a deep level,” director Rozzi adds. “A six-minute track can be intimidating, but with their vision and trust, I felt a sense of true freedom that I haven’t had the chance to feel in quite some time.”
Watch it below.
