Video Premiere: King Nobody “Long and Dusty Road”

Americana Highways brings you this video premiere of King Nobody’s song “Long and Dusty Road” from the forthcoming EP Space Cactus, due on December 18.  Songs on the EP were written and produced by Jerrold Ridenour.  

“Long and Dusty Road” is Jerrold Ridenour on bass and vocals; Aaron Bakker on slide guitar and clip-clops; and Jerrold Ridenour Sr on harmonica.

With a lot of arid footage, the video dovetails with the song’s intentions. When you’re hot and grimy on the road,  the arid climate utterly invades your soul, and King Nobody has distilled this experience into a song.  You can virtually taste the dust in the husky, fuzzy tones. 

“‘Long and Dusty Road’ was the first song written for the new EP, Space Cactus, before the idea of the EP was fully developed. I had this lonesome cowboy kind of a thought brewing, and honestly thought it would just be a single. The song was recorded and video was shot all in the course of a couple weeks.

It began as a phone recorded demo with me singing and strumming the guitar before I sent it off to a frequent collaborator and amazing guitarist, Aaron Bakker. He laid down the acoustic track with the clip-clop of the metronome and we chased the foundation for a brief moment landing on the spacious and emptiness of no percussion, and just the mellow gait of a horse walking along the long and dusty road.

Next stop, fuzz-town. Maybe it’s the desert, maybe it’s me, but fuzz goes into everything. It’s like salt in my soup, you don’t really want to taste it, but it needs to be there. I really wanted it to be not just spacious but spacey as well, so Aaron and I discussed the idea of lacing a little Ennio Morricone to it, with the fuzz-laden, spaghetti-western, rich electric guitar part. Then it was a matter of laying down the vocals, a limited bass line towards the latter half to keep it empty and spacious. Lastly calling my pops into the studio to lay down the bluesy harmonica intro. While he was laying it down, my wolf was in the studio minding her own business, but at one point chimed in with a really soft howl in key with the blues harp. If you listen closely you can hear her towards the middle of the harmonica rift.

When I started writing the rest of the EP, I was slightly concerned this original one-off might not fit with the rest of the album, but once I assembled it, I felt it was a great intro to the album. It’s paired with the bookend that is the cover of ‘Sixteen Tons,’ in that they both utilize simple instrumentation without a lot of bells and whistles, whereas the two middle songs, ‘Three Birds’ and especially ‘Reach’ are a lot more produced and less raw, although no less genuine in their lyrical prose. I am happy to share ‘Long and Dusty Road’ with the world, and I hope it resonates with you. — Jerrold Ridenour

Find more here: https://kingnobodyrocks.bandcamp.com