Jon is the former frontman for the band Rainmaker who found their fans among the jamband and world music scene. The band’s second album, Long Slow Fade, reached #2 on the jambands.com radio chart and featured Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Chi has gone on to create two solo efforts, Just For Now and Another Rising Sun which were more focused, songwriter-style records.
Jon is also a producer and engineer and has collaborated with artists including guitar greats Erenest Ranglin, Robben Ford, and Paul Barerre of Little Feat, songwriting talents Jolie Holland, James Mercer of the Shins, and the Jayhawks, and renowned session players Chris Chaney (Alanis Morisette), John Wesley McVicker Jr. (Sheila E, Usher), among many others. Chi’s songs have received major and college radio play, and have appeared in documentaries, commercials, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. His recordings have been described as “Musical magic” (Honest Tune Magazine) and “Moody and magnificent” (Liverpool Sound and Vision).
His upcoming album River of Marigolds is releasing on Earth Day, April 22nd. The album is a collaboration with Dave Schools (Widespread Panic) and they’ve assembled an all-star team to play on the record.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for the album’s title track, which features Chi on guitar and vocals, Dave Schools (bass), Dave Zirbel (pedal steel), Jeremy Hoenig (drums), and Mike Emerson (keyboards). Set to a haunting visual of wildfire footage with lyrics that speak to our current climate crisis, the song is a work of sweeping cosmic country that showcases Chi’s poignant songwriting alongside enchanting instrumentals. With Chi’s airy guitar playing taking the spotlight throughout the song and giving it that jammy vibe, the song stirs up a sense of melancholy nostalgia that is complemented by the twangy pedal steel and soulful keyboards. Chi’s careful solo work towards the end of the song signals that this song could be taken into more improvisational territory in the live setting.
Watch the video and read Chi’s comments on the song and its video below…
I first connected with Laura (Director Laura Kudritzki) last summer to talk about possibly doing a video together. She really took the time to understand where I was coming from as a writer. Laura pinpointed the important lyrics and the overall message of the song quickly so there was immediate trust. But we were also talking about overall influences like our favorite novels, our favorite records like Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, and about the Cohen Brothers and David Lynch. And, most importantly, she knew I was trying to balance struggle and hope here. “Toss us a tourniquet, send us a sage
We’ve been waiting on the wind to blow the other way” followed by the hopeful chorus is maybe the defining message of this album. So we wanted to capture the struggles of the past couple years but also hang on to a sense optimism.
The opening lyrics are:
“The first days of November
The ashes and the embers
Burnt out frames along the road”
So when the Shasta fires broke out last summer, Laura called and asked if we should drive up to them and see what we found. So I knew then that she is an artist who is incredibly dedicated to her vision. She finds beauty in truth rather than searching for truth in beauty. So of course I was in. We didn’t know if we would get near the fires or what we were driving into, but we decided to head that way.
We drove for a few hours and came across barricades, exhausted fire crews, apocalyptic skies, eerie smoke, and ashes and embers falling from the sky. It was hard to breath and harder to fathom.
We just sat with that footage for a while. Later on, in another tragic and seemingly inevitable wild fire, the entire town of Greenville, CA burnt to the ground. We made another long road trip and got there near sundown. I think we drove 9 hours that day and we probably only had about 45 minutes to shoot.
It was really emotional being there. It was painful seeing all of the loss. It was like standing in the middle of our fears and anxieties realized. The level of devastation was surreal. The Post Office was a just a burnt out shell and there were so many cars that had been abandoned and were torched beyond description. There was a portion of a building remaining and a huge neon sign dangling from it “Pioneer Cafe” that was staggering. You couldn’t help but imagine people tossing back pints there one night and literally running for their lives the next.
{FROM LAURA :“When we headed out to film the music video, a wildfire had just consumed the town of Greenville. The blackened cars were still parked at the shell of the diner. The threat of these fires is a part of our lives now.”}
You could see across the entire town because so many buildings had been flattened. It was almost too much to process. And it was all surrounded by beautiful mountains and sky on the way to High Sierra. Just surreal. In the middle of this bleakness, we came across a pristine American flag that someone had planted that was waving in the wind. It was unbelievable seeing our flag against that wreckage given all that our society has been going through, which is really straight out of this song. That image ended up going against the line “toss us a tourniquet, send us a sage / we’ve been waiting on the wind to blow the other way.” Before we even saw the footage back, we both knew that shot would end up against that lyric.
This scene also really hit me because my father escaped South Korea and the devastation of war to come here to build a life. The suitcase that is in the video during the second verse is the bag my father brought with him when he came to America. The contents of that bag were all he had with him. From so little, he somehow built a life for a family of 7 here. But he also understandably had baggage that resulted from many traumas of war.
{FROM LAURA} “The suitcase is an emblem of a journey. The suitcase passed down the generations for the journey taken together, for the hope shared. I wanted to shape Jon’s story by creating silhouettes with strong tonal contrast.”}
And so much of this song is about understanding your place in your family history – about what you receive and what you hand on. Now, I look at my own young son, and think of how different my Dad’s life was at that age. So much of that difference is made up of perseverance and dogged optimism. Laura did a great job of capturing the joy that’s built in to our kids but also framing that in some of the challenges we’re all going through. What are you going to do you with your own strengths and struggles to set your kids up to face their own challenges? How do you take adversity, struggle, and loss and turn that into strength, hope, and love?
“…toss us a tourniquet, send us a sage /We’ve been waiting on the wind to blow the other way–followed by the hopeful chorus is maybe the defining message of this album. The chorus is about understanding your place in your family history, and what you’re going to do with your own struggles to set your kids to face their own challenges. Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. I wanted it to be a folk song at its core but have an ethereal, somewhat unresolved feeling to it. I demo’d it as acoustic guitar and vocal, with the main guitar melody in there. The intro had a little acoustic guitar figure that I thought was really integral to the song. When we went to record it, on the first take, Dave played this bass melody that went along with the acoustic and I just about fell out of my chair. It was so driving but at the same time melodic and floating. Just completely original. We ended up just muting the acoustic guitar for the whole song because that bass part set the tone so beautifully. It really just set the landscape for the rest of the song to come in.”
One Response
This is incredibly awesome!