Video premiere: Shere Disraeli, ‘Coffee and Weed’

Kevin Bronson on November 16th, 2017

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Shere Disraeli was born to be a songwriter, but the young L.A. folk singer has taken a difficult and circuitous route to finishing his first album. First, there is the name, Shere, which is pronounced “sheer” and means “song.” He was born in Israel during the first Gulf War and came to the U.S. when his family fled the region, settling in Venice, and he eventually fell in with a free-jazz musicians’ collective. As a teenager, he earned gigs as a drummer, learned guitar, bass, piano and harmonica and enjoyed the tutelage of drummer James Gadson and violinist/songwriter Lili Haydn. But Disraeli’s musical exploits took a detour when he 1) developed Crohn’s disease, 2) was hit by a car his senior year of high school, and 3) moved to Oregon, where he became a beekeeper, full-time farmer and permaculture designer. His ongoing health battles forced him to move back to L.A., where he recalibrated and recorded some of the 50 songs he had written.

“Coffee and Weed” is one of them, a smiling and sweetly stoned folk-blues jam whose easy-schmeezy tempo finds the songwriter picking his guitar in a quest to “take it slow / get into my flow.” Lest you think Disraeli is too mellow to even get out of bed, there’s the new video for song, which features stop-motion work by Michael Benor, Julia Brauner and Carrick O’Reilly and follows Disraeli partaking in some of his favorite activities: playing music, enjoying nature, shopping in his Venice neighborhood and, of course, imbibing in the titular substances. Chill out, there’s wine involved too.

||| Watch: The video for “Coffee and Weed”