The official video for DBT’s This Fucking Job is finally here. The video is exactly what you would hope for this song, and ends in true Trucker fashion. SPOILER ALERT: Someone dies.

If you want to read more about the song or the album, check out of of these other 87 posts I’ve done about it.

Jason Sievers is a Boise based artist who makes amazing music videos. The stuff he does is really difficult and time consuming, and he somehow manages to make awe-inspiring visuals that beautifully support the music without distracting you or taking away from the song. His rhythmic use of stop-motion makes the surreal organic, which should be an oxymoron, but in this case, it’s not.

Jason’s videos seamlessly compliment the music like coffee and cigarettes, fried steak and gravy, or what I imagine Jack and Coke was like back in the olden days when they called it Coke for a reason.

For the most part, multimedia art can be a double-edged sword that I’d generally rather stab in my eye socket than watch. Whenever I walk into a museum and see TV monitors set up, I say to myself, “Oh great, more video of starving African babies shot with a red filter, flash cut together with pictures of fat, American kids, set to carnival noises. Well, that should fix things,” but I would gladly walk around juggling a little paper plate full of cheese cubes and a plastic cup with two ounces of wine in it while dodging douchebags mindlessly regurgitating words they learned in college, just to see Jason’s work set up in an exhibit he designed. However, I have a feeling his exhibit would be much cooler than that and not attract the type of people that piss me off.

I’ve watched this video for Boy Eats Drum Machine’s Hoop +Wire about a dozen times today already, and now I can’t get the song out of my head, in a good way.

Jason made this one for The Lights using clip art and old rubdown letters. Seriously.

Wake was the first video from Jason I saw that got me into his stuff and Finn Riggins. You can see more of Jason’s work here, and here are links for Boy Eats Drum Machine, The Lights, and Finn Riggins.

So the Truckers are having people upload videos of the worst job they’ve ever had. Seeing that I worked in the public bathroom at the LA Country fair some time ago, I felt obliged to chime in, so here’s my video.

Yup, it’s basically a two and half minute shit story. Also, you should note that I said I “worked” at the Hustler store, not “work” there, as in now, so don’t be asking me for discounts on dildos. That was a long time ago.

There are all kinds of prizes you can win for submitting your video, including a chance to be in the official video for “This Fucking Job.” So go submit your video about your worst job,  but I wouldn’t plan on winning, because as shitty as you think your job is, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. I don’t know, maybe someone worked in two county fair bathrooms.

Oh, and I should probably point out, your video is actually supposed to be a video of you doing your current shitty job, not just bitching about something you did eight years ago, and it should be around a minute long. There’s more info here.

It’s not like I need to prime the pump for the Trucker’s new record the Big To-Do coming out on March 16^th, but hey, it’s DBT, and sometimes I just can’t help myself. The album’s fucking epic, and I’ll probably give myself a happy seizure writing the full review. You can read more about This Fucking Job here.

Big thanks to jonicont for making this and other high quality DBT videos and posting them on his youtube channel. Shooting and recording live music isn’t easy, especially with a band as loud as the Truckers, but he does a damn fine job. And no one has captured them playing People Who Died this well (believe me, I’ve looked for it):

I’m pretty sure the Truckers cover this song so much, because it’s the only song in the world where more people die than in one of their own tracks, plus it’s badass.

Of course, the show ain’t over until I hear Let There Be Rock, which has admittedly made for some awkward situations when I drunkenly refuse to leave the venue if they haven’t played it. “Polite but firm” my ass, security dudes.

Ok, I’ll reluctantly quit my DBT video binge after just three videos, but if you’re a Trucker fan (and you should be) you need to check out jonicont’s youtube channel and subscribe to it, he’s got some great stuff, including the Big To-Do’s vinyl only bonus track Girls Who Smoke.

I tend to go on a lot about bands that can just show up anywhere and play under any conditions, because, well,  not everybody can or will.

Some musicians walked into my non-descript, off-white, Fight Club style office and said “you want me to sing into your webcam?” with a look on their face like a clown was going to jump out of a closet and molest them at any minute, ushering in a new low in reality television. However, some people showed up, looked around, and said, “hey Jimbo, we don’t have your acoustic bass– you just want to play on this 6 string?”

Jason, Browan, and Jimbo just went with it and sounded amazing.

When they hit the harmonies on this song and “Streetlights,” I actually felt it. And I don’t mean “felt it” in a guy-who’s-comfortable-talking-about-his-emotions kind of way. I mean I actually felt the vibrations pushing the air in the room. It was like feeling a sixth sense for the first time, overwhelmingly powerful and comforting, like the first half of an oxycontin milkshake handmade by Jesus himself.

In that room, they sounded like a chorus of barely road weary angels, but I suspect the Bible would have been less impressive if the angels had to be digitally compressed and uploaded onto youtube also.  

I first heard Jason sing this song a few months before the album came out earlier this year. It was just him and Browan playing an acoustic show. A few people were taping it, which Jason didn’t mind, but when he got to this song, he asked them to stop, since it hadn’t been released yet, and of course, they did.

The next day I scoured the internet to see if I could find a recording of it, partially because I was curious if he had been able to keep it under wraps, and also, because it’s a fucking amazing song, and I wanted to hear it again.

I couldn’t find it anywhere. No trace of it. Considering this is a band that plays, on average, 200 shows a year across the country and into Europe, that’s a hell of a testament to the loyalty of their fans. Jason’s one of those guys that puts so much of himself into a song, that you can’t help but feel you know him.

You may not know who he’s singing about or the exact situation, but you can feel the emotional sincerity pouring out of him.

There’s a fine line between writing a song everyone can connect to and just churning out the usual lowest common denominator sing-along bullshit that is instantly familiar, but Jason occupies that small space.

“She smelled like cigarettes and wine.” I know that girl, you know that girl– hell, we all know that girl. Well, probably not the exact girl, but we’ve all known a few, and even more so, we all know the feeling he’s singing about. Even if you couldn’t understand English, you’d know exactly what is going on in this song.

If for some reason you don’t own the album, get it here.

I shot this on the day “Poetry of the Deed” was released. Frank came in that morning to join me for the CNN webcast from my office at Current and then played a few more songs afterwards. The whole experience was a shining example of how much the media and music industry have changed over the past few years. My favorite artist from the UK came into my office in LA and played a song that was skyped into the studios in Atlanta and broadcast live to the world, and all it took was a guy with a guitar and a Mac with a webcam. That’s pretty badass.

A few weeks earlier, we ran Frank’s video for “the Road” on the segment and told people to go get “Love, Ire and Song” to prep for the release of “Poetry of the Deed.” The next day, Chris, Frank’s American wrangler, @’d on twitter asking if I wanted Frank to play in my office. Fuck yeah, I did.

After a few messages under 140 characters, we set it up. Frank rolled in somewhere around 9 AM, tuned his guitar as we waited for our cue from Atlanta and I begrudgingly had to explain who John Gossling is and why he was the top story of the day, which basically amounted to “because everything’s bullshit.”

Over the past few years, I’ve shot and interviewed a lot of musicians, and from what I can tell, there’s basically two types: the good ones and the rest of them. Hell, I’ve interviewed some people who didn’t even want to play a song, as if they earn their living from talking about themselves. Not Frank, he was all aces. When I told him that he was going to sit in a desk chair and sing into a webcam and then answer a few questions from the anchors as it was broadcast to the world live, he just said “cool,” as if that kind of thing happened everyday, and then he nailed it, and I just sat their grinning like a stoned Cheshire cat.   

Truth is, I think you could put Frank anywhere and he’d put on a hell of a show. I’m pretty sure if you handed him his acoustic guitar, a parachute, and put a foot to his ass at 14,000 feet, Frank would hit the ground and immediately put on a show that the locals talked about for generations. You’d be a dick for doing it, but he could probably pull it off.

Later that week, I was lucky enough to see Frank play at a house party. He played until the cops showed up around 5 AM. Or I guess, technically until a little after the cops showed up. Once the fuzz got there, I kept drunkenly whisper-shouting “Keep playing! Keep playing! C’mon, you gotta keep playing!” which was probably really annoying, but I was about 12 hours of beer deep at that point, and sometimes I get excited.

I’m not telling you that story in a “la-ti-da I get to go to Hollywood parties kind of way,” but rather in a “you could be there too” kind of way. After playing sold-out shows at clubs and theatres, Frank will play house parties for pretty much anyone who gathers a crowd and gives him some beer and a place to sleep for a few hours, which finally brings us back to the song above.

Every lyric is pure gold, but “…thinking that you’re better because you sit up on some stage, if you’re oh so fucking different, than who cares what you have to say? Because there’s no such thing as rock stars, there’s just people who play music, and some of them are just like us, and some of them are dicks” is fucking brilliant and it really sums up all my experiences with Frank better than this post could if I rambled on for another 8 pages, so go listen to it again.