One Shot: The Making of What We Got Is Gold
In the spring of 2019, I drove from Boston to Los Angeles, my station wagon packed to the gills as usual. I was making the move to LA, ready start fresh in a new city, a city that had enchanted me when I first visited in 2017 to begin working on Visions. Along the way, I stopped in Nashville for a couple of meetings, and before the week was over, I quite unexpectedly found myself in a studio shooting the music video for “What We Got Is Gold” with Jim Shea, a gifted photographer who I have since worked with many times.
If you’ve seen the cover of Linda Ronstadt’s record Simple Dreams, or Joni Mitchell’s black and white music video for her 1988 song “The Beat Of Black Wings,” then you’ve seen Jim Shea’s work. He’s shot everyone from Linda to John Prine to Bonnie Raitt to Jackson Browne, and, like so many of the wonderful creative people I have met in the past few years, he happened to be a friend of a friend of Freebo. I handed Jim a copy of Visions and said, “If you have time, I’m in town for a couple more days and I’d love to make a video.” When he asked if I had a particular song in mind, I replied, “Listen to the record and tell me what song you want to do.”
In our conversation that evening, he told me he had a vision for my song “What We Got Is Gold,” and right away I knew he had made the right choice. An intimate ballad, “Gold” is a standout on the record. It’s revealing, honest, and totally vulnerable, and we agreed that the video would have to reflect that energetic. We rented a photo studio for the day, hired a wonderful hair and makeup artist, Joel Green, and I went shopping for a couple of different outfits. It all came together in 24 hours. That day in the studio, Jim shot me performing the song from many different angles, in different lights, up close, far away, with guitar, without guitar. I probably sang the song 50 times. He got great footage all day, far more than was needed for a 3 1/2-minute video, and when we wrapped that evening, I was sure we had it.
What I didn’t know, what none of us knew yet, was that Jim wouldn’t need all the shots he took that day. Toward the end of the day, he had captured a performance that blew all the other ones away. Maybe the 45th time I sang the song, something very special happened. I locked into the emotion of the lyrics, I locked into the camera, and we got one take that needed no cuts, no edits. It was perfect, just as it was. It was all there. All my love and joy, sadness and regret, shyness and boldness. Every emotion, every line, it was all there. It’s difficult to put into words just how proud I am of this video, but I truly consider it to be some of my finest work.
In the fall of that year, the video premiered via the music blog B-Sides & Badlands, and writer Jason Scott wrote an utterly beautiful piece to accompany it. You can read the article here.
Take a look at the video. I hope you love it as much as I do.
“The warmth ricochets from a deep, plentiful well in her bones, and in keeping the focus narrow, the music video is like peering directly into the heart-strung walls of her soul.”