Video: Chelsea Wolfe, ‘Deranged for Rock & Roll’

Kevin Bronson on September 5th, 2019

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Is rock ’n’ roll a calling? An affliction? A search for a higher, truer self? A multi-sensory puzzle begging to be solved?

It’s probably all those in Chelsea Wolfe’s new single “Deranged for Rock & Roll,” the latest from her riveting album “Birth of Violence,” out Sept. 13 via Sargent House. It’s the sixth full-length for Wolfe, who casts her songwriting gaze internally (“Be All Things” and “Dirt Universe”) and externally (“American Darkness” and “Erde”) as she invites listeners on her journey. And it is that, from the opening strum — and Sturm und Drang — of “The Mother Road,” an ode to Route 66 and a sort of mission statement: “Guess I needed someone to shake me up,” she sings. By the finish, the album has circled round to “Highway” before finishing with the minute-long sound of the thunderstorm, “The Storm,” suggesting the clouds, while having been documented, have not passed.

Driven by her acoustic guitar and darkly elegant incantations, the album gains widescreen impact in collaborator Ben Chisholm’s dramatic production flourishes. “All these years / have made me strong,” she sings in “Deranged,” fully resigned to her art. The song “is my love song to music,” Wolfe says. “Every time I ever tried to walk a different path, music always called me back home to it. It’s in my blood; it’s my one source of true peace. I love its chaos and its rough edges, and I love the way it can bring understanding and comfort. I belong to music, and it to me.”

The video is the work of Gilbert Trejo (Pixies, Starcrawler, DIIV, Palm Springsteen, among others) transports the song, appropirately, to the desert.

“I feel Gilbert’s video illustrates that unnamed pull towards something so well,” Wolfe says. “My character is destined to sing the same song over and over in this purgatory of a desert bar, while different people come through the town and begin to feel the pull as well, drawing them into this vortex to stay for good.”

||| Watch: The video for “Deranged for Rock & Roll”