Video: Nick Waterhouse, ‘Wreck the Rod’

Kevin Bronson on February 14th, 2019

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Nick Waterhouse, with Danny Trejo in the "Wreck the Rod" video

Nick Waterhouse continues to mine the dog-eared pages of rock ’n’ roll to make everything old sound new again. With a wink, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter-producer nods to the past in the new video for “Wreck the Rod,” which co-stars Danny Trejo and is directed by his son, Gilbert.

Trejo plays the host of the talk show “Dan After Dark,” and Waterhouse portrays the musical guest — a bandleader who’s still playing his “old” hits. “‘Wreck the Rod’ finds Danny as an alternate reality Mike Douglas and some version of myself living out the ravages and indignities of the very lyrics I’m singing,” Waterhouse says. “Where’s all this media and content heading in 2019? We posit right to 1978, baby.”

Waterhouse says the song was inspired by a conversation with “Soul Queen of New Orleans” Irma Thomas on “singers being used up by an industry (in addition to a larger swath of society), about riding it out, about rising above, about an unsettling pleasure/pain dynamic,” he says.

“Wreck the Rod,” which follows December’s release of “Song for Winners,” is the second single from Waterhouse’s fourth album, a self-titled affair that is out March 8 via Innovative Leisure.

||| Watch: The video for “Wreck the Rod”