Kevin Bronson on October 24th, 2018

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When Lauren Rocket released her new single “Diamond Nights” last month, she explained that it was inspired by the long miles she spent on the road as a touring member in other bands. So when it came time to imagine a music video, why not base it on a road trip as well?

As it turned out, director Kansas Bowling’s video, shot on 16 MM film, did involve a road trip — just not the one the songwriter imagined. “I had wanted to shoot the video at the Salton Sea,” says the woman behind the Rocket name, Lauren Willow White. “Kansas suggested we go to Nevada. What we ended up doing was a three-day road trip through Nevada. We started in Las Vegas, drove up through Rhyolite in Ghost Valley to the sheet ghost statues, then to Tonopah to The Clown Motel and goldmine graveyard and then Area 51. This ended up being the perfect way to film this video, which was initially inspired by touring through America and how that felt for me. It felt like touring again. The truck stops, the beautiful landscapes, the friendships you make along the way. … I had a treatment [for the video], but after night one, we decided to let the treatment go, follow our map and see where the road took us. And it really took us to some strange places.”

Bowling, 22, is no stranger to weird, or kitschy and whimsical. As a teenager she made a “prehistoric slasher film” that starred Kato Kaelin. She did two music videos, one for Them Guns and one for Kat Meoz, that featured her guy pal Rodney Bingenheimer, and two for Death Valley Girls (the second featuring Iggy Pop). Her recent effort for Brooklyn environmental punks Surfbort is … well, messy.

“Diamond Nights,” Bowling says, is a “perfect love letter to my favorite state, Nevada!” Which, of course, can be pretty strange.

Lauren Rocket picks up the story: “Along the way, we found a brothel in the middle of Nevada at a gas station. We ended up shooting the majority of the video here, with a woman named Molly who was gracious enough to let us shoot in her amazing bedroom (she lived and worked at the brothel), and we even featured her as an actress in the video. I don’t know if we’ll ever see Molly again, our little diamond in the rough. … This experience ended up being the perfect concoction of road trip, freedom, magic and female electricity. Nothing was staged and everything was happenstance.

“I wanted to let Kansas really take over and allowed her to dictate our experience, because I trusted her vision so much. And she nailed it. She somehow empathically knew me. Las Vegas — the lights, the despair, the promise and the underbelly — has always been something I’ve felt strangely connected to. And going into Area 51, as a devout alien lover and space queen, was beyond dreamy. That combined with the darkness of the clown motel, which is connected to a turn-of-the-century graveyard in the middle of a town most people don’t even know exists, was a priceless experience.”

||| Watch: The video for “Diamond Nights”