Video: Blitzen Trapper, ‘Joanna’

Kevin Bronson on November 27th, 2017

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No matter what label their music has been slapped with over the years — country, folk, rock — Blitzen Trapper’s appeal has always been a penchant for narrative storytelling. So it is with their ninth album, “Wild and Reckless,” released earlier this month. It’s a collection of tales from the pockmarked skin of America that actually began as a musical the band staged in its hometown of Portland. After the production’s 28-performance run, songwriter Eric Earley and the band adjourned to pen five more songs, conceiving the album as a companion to their 2008 album “Furr.”

Writer/director Josh Brine’s video for the murder ballad “Joanna” surveys the rural crime scene, stark and forlorn, as the narrator contemplates having killed the man who sexually assaulted her. The song “raises questions and gets at the riddle of what justice really means,” Earley told Paste, where the video premiered. “I wrote it some time ago but kept it from being released until this record. … It felt like the right time for it to see the light of day, a song that deals with sexual assault and gun violence, in many ways a fanciful tale since victims of assault rarely find justice against their attacker. In my 20s, my closest friend was a victim of this type of violence and her story filled me with such anger and confusion. This song is in ways me explaining to myself and dealing with that frustration that there is extreme darkness that exists in the world, that there are monsters, and often those monsters end up holding the power.”

||| Watch: The video for “Joanna”