Jake Sheppard is a musician, filmmaker, and ex-scientist from Colorado, currently based in Los Angeles, California. Before his pivot, he worked as a cancer geneticist, but he left the lab to go to art school, a move that is still hotly debated over holiday dinners at his parents’ house. Midwest Marlin (due out out March 29th) is the first project Sheppard has released under his own name, with the intention of giving himself “nowhere to hide”, within which he pushes his abilities as a songwriter and producer to new heights, and marries the country-rock music of his youth to the alt-rock ambitions of his adolescence. Having lived in Los Angeles for many years now, the city has permeated Sheppard’s work, and the album is full of overheard conversations, neighborhood characters, and his own brand of self-deprecating humor, yet, as the name of the album belies, he’s still very much a fish out-of-water.
Born from the love and angst in his own life, and continual calamity in the world around us, the album is a tapestry of the voices, characters and scenes which resist confining themselves to a single narrative thread, yet collectively put their finger on something large, obsequious, and distinctly American. Sheppard strives to give voice to that which sits unsettled and squirming in himself, and walks that peculiar path laid out by the likes of John Prine, Randy Newman, and David Berman; a funny kind of heart-sick.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for the standout track “Bird Clock,” a work of melancholy indie folk that hums along nicely with Sheppard’s easygoing vocals and sharply picked guitar. The song title is a reference to an oddball appliance but also serves as a painful – both physical and emotional – of past love. The video is darkly humorous, providing a complementary visual to this strange lyrical tale that comes complete with whistled harmonies.
Sheppard describes the inspiration behind the song:
This song is based on a true story: I got dumped in a mall and my girlfriend, in her haste to leave the food court, and our relationship, left without the Singing Bird Clock she’d bought at Sharper Image. The clock was a gift for her grandma, whose 90th birthday I was no longer invited to. I hung the clock in my room, and for the next several months, the hourly cries of Orioles and House Wrens mixed with my own, eventually leading to an intervention of roommates and other tenants, sick of the noise. We all agreed I could at least take out the batteries.
WATCH:
