Country-tinged California band The Mother Hips have been chugging along for over twenty years, amassing a cult following in that time as a result of their groovy, laid back songs and live shows that are never the same. In that time the Hips have released nine full-length albums, an impressive catalogue to say the least. The band’s lanky frontman Tim Bluhm has also managed to release a handful of solo albums, not including his numerous collaborations with other artists. Now, after all this time, one of the founding members of the Hips, who also shares guitar and vocal duties with Bluhm, is stepping out with his own project.
On September 23rd Greg Loiacono will release his debut solo record, Songs From a Golden Dream. The Mother Hips have long held a respectable crossover appeal within the jam band scene and the Americana, alt-country crowd, falling in the same tradition of groups like The Band, The Byrds, and of course the Grateful Dead. Loiacono continues in this same vein with his solo album, but seems to be focused less on the jam side of things and more on the singing and songwriting. Sure, the album has plenty of that twangy California country rock, but there are also softer, more heartfelt tunes to counterbalance it, like the final track “The Red Thread Part III (The Days Long Wind)”. Today we are excited to premiere the new animated video for that song right here on Glide Magazine.
The song finds Loiacono branching out into folkier territory, and is sort of like a dreamy comedown to bring it all back home when you make it to the end of the album. This makes sense, given the inspiration behind it. “The song was initially written as a lullaby for my young daughter. Most of the imagery is taken from a specific dream I had. For me, the song’s meaning ended up being more about disconnecting from the daily grind and allowing your dreams to carry you off to some other place for a while,” Loiacono says.
This subject matter makes the tune perfect for the animated sequence that plays out in the video, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that the idea for the video came to Loiacono in an almost dreamlike state.
“I was in bed one night (long after the song had been written) thinking about how an animated video for this song would play out and realized it is all there already. The animator could just follow the words. I wrote out how I saw the animation playing out and then talked it over with the animator, Josh Clark. He went to work on it and came back with a fantastic rendition of the story,” he says.
WATCH:
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Greg Loiacono’s Songs From a Golden Dream is out September 23rd. To pre-order, hear more tunes, and find out more visit gregloiacono.com.
photo credit: Andrew Quist