Jefferson Berry and the UAC – “First Purple Light”
Americana Highways brings you this video premiere of Jefferson Berry’s song “First Purple Light.” From his recently released album Prairie Fire, “First Purple Light” was adapted from a poem by Charlie O’Hay. Like the four albums produced by Berry over the last four years, Prairie Fire was engineered by Matt Muir at Retro City Studios.
This video is the first fully AI folk video that we have seen.
“First Purple Light” is Jefferson Berry on vocals and acoustic guitar; Bud Burroughs on mandolin; Dave Brown on lap steel; Uncle Mike on bass; and Tim Kelly on percussion.
For this video, Jefferson Berry organized the A.I. Storyboard. Ciro Ayala of Provoke Productions was the creative director; Joe Schufreider managed the performance camera and lighting; and the video was recorded at Lafayette Hills Studios.
The pretty music draws you in nice and easy with its twinkling mandolin and acoustic guitar and it’s a song of sunrise, until things take a deeper, darker more somber turn just as the first birds of daylight have begun their singing. It’s a song of bruises, justice and redemption. As it is placed here against a background of Jefferson and the band, and visuals that are at once clearly AI but also capture the essence of the tale in startling accuracy, it’s also a pioneer in the AI age that’s right around the corner for us all.
When approaching social justice themes with my songwriting, I’ve come to see story telling as more than just lyrics and musical arrangements. Americana Folk will always be about story telling, but with the Domestic Violence that “First Purple Light” exposes, Artificial Intelligence makes these kinds of stories vivid and the healing more apparent. – Jefferson Berry
Find more details and information on his website here: https://www.jeffersonberry.com
Enjoy our previous coverage here: Interview: Jefferson Berry Brings Urban Tales To “Dreams of Modern Living”
Watch another hybrid AI video and a discussion of the concept, here: The Ghost in the Machine
