Cut Worms – Castle in the Clouds
2020 · Directed by Max Clarke
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Best comments
1.“If John Lennon were a cowboy, he'd sound like this.”
More comments
- 2.“Dwight Yoakam's been phoning it in for decades. Now I'm Team Cut Worms.”
The story
Max Clarke made this one himself, at home, in 2020, when nobody was going anywhere. No shoot needed. He stitched mid-century stock footage together with quick bursts of his own animation (Clarke draws as well as he writes) and got a hazy, retro-future dream out of it. Tomorrow as somebody pictured it in 1955, seen through a fogged-up window.
The song is older. Clarke wrote it in April 2019, rewrote it at least once, and finished it on the plane to Memphis the day before the session. It was the first thing the band cut at Sam Phillips Studio with producer Matt Ross-Spang (John Prine, Jason Isbell, Margo Price), straight to tape with no demo. Clarke said the control room looked like the bridge of a spaceship and put him in mind of the theme from Carl Sagan's Cosmos. You can hear it. A cowboy song with its head in orbit.
It landed on Nobody Lives Here Anymore, the double album Jagjaguwar put out that October. Jangly guitars, honky-tonk piano, a little outer space. Somehow it all fits in the same saddlebag.
