A subterranean landscape of found and archival footage forms a lush backdrop for this sad and enigmatic song by Winterpills. From the album “All My Lovely Goners” on Signature Sounds / Soft Alarm.
I started out by searching YouTube for footage of freight trains. What I found was Elizabeth Cotton singing “Freight Train” in 1957 on Pete Seeger’s TV show. (Who knew Pete Seeger had a TV show?)
Then the algorithm threw the James Baldwin footage at me, and I decided to submit to the logic of the search engine, gathering imagery using a sort of Flarf poetry approach. When I saw how Allen Ginsberg’s finger-gesture lined up with the piano riff, I had to go with it.
I threw all this footage in the blender along with some handmade artwork and a bunch of Hi-8 footage I’d shot in the NYC subway in the 1990’s. The dreamlike final shot, a view out the front window of a train barreling down tracks overgrown with weeds and trees, was (and is) incredibly mysterious and compelling to me.