Sometimes you need to go back to the beginning. I wrote my first song, “Highway 17”, twelve or so years ago. It went on my first CD, and still seems to be one of tunes people know me for. (Honestly, it’s pretty humbling and cool.) KPIG radio has also been kind to the song. If you’re not familiar with the road, Highway 17 is 18+ miles of four-lane highway that connects Santa Cruz to San Jose (Silicon Valley). It’s a gorgeous drive. But…add thousands of agitated drivers and the usual commute nonsense that ensues (detailed in the song), and things get interesting.
When I first released the song, Richard Masoner (a fellow commuter) strapped a video onto the Highway 17 bus, married the footage to my song, and posted it as “Highway 17 in Three Minutes”. Way cool idea. In the back of my head, I pictured one-day creating a video with a live version of the song that also used commute footage.
Bounce ahead a few years. I’ve since added more verses to the song – Highway 17 is an inspiring piece of road – and released a live version on my “Lump of Coal” EP. I’m now fortunate to work with the very talented videographer Richard Newman (see Best of Breed Romance or She’s My Superpower). I storyboarded the Highway 17 song and spent most of last fall with a GoPro camera locked onto my dashboard during the morning drive, capturing a ridiculous amount (roughly 50 gigabytes) of “scenery”. I eventually video’d key elements of the song (“motorcycle splitting lanes”, “there’s some guy changing a flat”). It took awhile, since most of my commute days were uneventful – that’s actually a good thing.
I finally turned the footage over to Richard, along with a storyboard, and a custom traffic report from KPIG’s own “Aileen the Traffic and Weather Queen”. He took my ideas, along with video he recorded of me at a house concert last year, ramped it WAY up, and created the finished video above.
Love it!
Great song. Cool video. The infinite inspiration of Bay Area commutes 🙂 Thanks for sharing the story behind the story. Execution of creative vision is an interesting process. It is a wonderful feeling to have a project like this come to fruition. Congratulations!! Most of my poems are born on the Highway – inspired by what I see during the morning commute – including “Sunrise over Santa Clara” and many others in California Serenade and Finding the Vista Point. Storytelling is fun and you & Richard have done a really nice job with this. Hope to see many more..