Rob Baird’s dynamic trio of “Ain’t Nobody Got A Hold On Me,” “Wrong Side of the River,” and “Horses” are compelling stories in themselves. But when Baird teamed up with director Matt Bizer to create a three part video, a new imagining unfolded.
“The entire album captures a certain motion and movement of transition and open ended journeys,” Bizer, who developed the concept for the visual and shot across Nashville, Memphis, and Terlingua, TX, tells NPR. “A world where good and evil, right and wrong and truth and fiction are all relative to the perspective of our individual experiences. A world of moral ambiguity. I couldn’t separate the songs and these ideas. Not to mention they flowed together so gracefully and cinematic. It quickly evolved into this sort of ‘rule of three’ and the power of that. Three characters, three stories, three places. Three acts in the same intertwined story.”
It’s a presentation that finds the characters simultaneously lost and found; identity is lost and revealed, homes are abandoned and returned to. As the cinematic telling opens to bluesy guitar licks and a dusty cowboy awakening on cracked earth, there’s a sense of every man in this man’s peculiar predicament: stand tall, don your hat, and move forward.
Through the album’s bluesy, rolling lead track, “Ain’t Nobody Got A Hold On Me,” title track “Wrong Side of the River,” and the breathtakingly spacious “Horses,” Baird and Bizer present events, characters, and actions without good or bad, simply as truths.