VIDEO PREMIERE: The Delevantes Return to Harmonic Roots Rock Glory with “Little By Little”

On the precipice of brothers Bob and Mike Delevante helping define a new collective genre of music, Rolling Stone once said “The Delevantes deliver a broad view of the American musical crossroad where country and rock meet and, in this case, become one.” To put it simply, The Delevantes—along with contemporaries like Lucinda Williams, Wilco, Son Volt, the Jayhawks, and Whiskeytown—were right in the middle of it all when the term “Americana” started getting thrown around in regards to music. Now, after two decades since their last album, The Delevantes find themselves releasing new music into a thriving international scene of the roots-meets-rock-meets-country sound they helped pioneer. On September 17th, Bob and Mike are releasing The Delevantes’ A Thousand Turns, a full-length album produced by The Delevantes, long-term production partner and founding member of E Street Band, Garry Tallent, and multi-instrumentalist, Dave Coleman.

The Delevantes debut album, Long About That Time, was released by Rounder Records to considerable critical acclaim in 1995. Garry Tallent, long-time bass player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, co-produced the record. Entertainment Weekly gave the album an “A” and called it “big-city toughness with bluegrass twang.” Original music videos for outstanding singles “Driving at Night,” and “Pocketful of Diamonds” played in regular rotation on VH1, CMT and other music channels, and the Delevantes performed live on The Conan O’Brien Show. A growing fanbase creating a buzz, hits on the new Gavin Americana radio chart, and a memorable roots-rockin’ performance at SXSW in Austin helped the Delevantes seal a major label deal with Capitol Records. Their second album and major label debut Postcards From Along The Way, was again co-produced by Tallent.

Tallent is back yet again as co-producer on A Thousand Turns. In 2019, Bob and Mike Delevante returned to New Jersey to open for Southside Johnny, joined by Bruce Springsteen and Tallent, at the legendary Stone Pony Summer Stage in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Performing together again sparked new creative energy. With an invitation from Nashville’s Blackbird Academy to record, the brothers reunited with bandmates Tallent and Bryan Owings. The sessions gave birth to A Thousand Turns, produced by the Delevantes, Garry Tallent and Dave Coleman, and mixed by Mixmaster Bill Schnee.

Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of the video for “Little By Little,” the album’s first single. The duo’s brotherly blood harmonies are in fine form as they mix a touch of the Everly Brothers with timeless roots rock and power pop to make for a light-hearted tune that will put a smile on your face. The stop motion technique used in the video provides a fun and pleasant visual to capture the mood of the song. Considering that the band’s new album is their first in two decades, the tune shows their musical abilities are more in-tact than ever before.

The brothers describe the inspiration and process behind the song and video:

Sometimes in your life you feel like you’re getting nowhere, maybe even going backwards. But over the course of time, looking back you can see how far you have in fact come…”little by little, I got all the way there.”

The video was directed and created by our friend Jon Morgan. He had done some work with stop-motion animation before and we thought that would be a great way to visually capture “Little by Little”. Going back and forth between the slow, awkward, movement of the stop-motion frames and the hyper-speed of the time lapse images, told the story…“you take a step and then you take one more, some days you crawl, some days you soar.”

Jon, Bob and Mike hit the street in Bob’s 1974 Ford F100 pickup truck, armed with a harmonica, Mike’s Danelectro Convertible guitar, (The same guitar he played in our first video for “Pocketful of Diamonds”!), and a couple of cameras. Two thousand, seven hundred and thirty stop-motion frames later…”I got there little by little, little by little I got all the way there.”

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Photo credit: Emma Delevante