Gary Clark Jr.'s recent single from 2012's Blak and Blu is a seven-minute blues epic that showcases the guitar players exceptional chops. The musician recently dropped the music video for "When My Train Pulls In," which features two storylines about youngsters and their issues. Carmela Makela directed the video, Consequence of Sound notes.
Things start out pretty cheery in the video below. A young woman heads to high school, where she meets her boyfriend for some pre-class romance while a teenage male wakes up his younger brother and gets him ready for school. Clark's guitar work is the emotional signifier in the video, and just as things go south for the characters, the guitarist tears through a blistering solo. Check it out below.
"I was told to take out the sex scene but I fought for it," Makela told NOWNESS about the part when the young woman is subsequently dumped after a rump in a car. "I drove to Warner Brothers and asked to speak to the marketing manager and explain from a woman's perspective."
"It's that weird time before you are an adult, before you know —as a girl— that sex is supposed to feel good and you are supposed to know your worth, or that you have a choice," she added. "That scene was my favorite to write, to shoot and to edit. It is a moment that a lot of girls see and get a feeling in their stomach, because we've all been there. It's a very real situation."
Blak and Blu is Clark's first release on a major label. It earned him two Grammy nominations, and he won for Best R&B Performance for "Please Come Home."
"Give Clark credit for striving to be something more than a blues-rock throwback and singing from a troubled heart," Rolling Stone wrote. "And hope that he gets through the narrow portals of pop radio. But on this album, it's still his blues that cut deepest."
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