Dick Connette and Suzzy Roche Debut Striking New Video for “Black River Falls”

A few weeks after the release of his new album Too Sad for the Public – Vol. 1 Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade (American Folk Fantasies), composer and producer Dick Connette has shared a video for the Suzzy Roche collaboration “Black River Falls.” Visual artist Lewis Klahr created the eye-catching clip, which features a mix of found objects, photographs, and drawings, many of which were vintage store finds. 

“Working on my digital film for ‘Black River Falls’ was a great pleasure as I got to collage images to the music of two longterm faves—composer Dick Connette and singer Suzzy Roche,” Klahr explains. “The lucidity and power of the lyrics gave me a great deal of freedom to create a visual montage that complemented and enlarged the overview of the town being described. The imagery was culled from a 1930s encyclopedia that I purchased in a highway rest stop restaurant/used bookstore on the Massachusetts turnpike way back in the early 1980s.”

Connette wrote and arranged the haunting tune, which lends Roche’s ethereal vocals the perfect spare backdrop and plenty of breathing room. He found inspiration for the song’s lyrics in a 1973 book of photographs and anecdotes about the Wisconsin city Black River Falls.

“Most of the stories told in this song came from Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, which I recommend unreservedly to your attention, as well as anything else he turns his attention to,” Connette explains. “The shape of the melody and the banjo/cello part I got from Karen Dalton’s version of ‘Same Old Man.’ I feel the same way about her as I do about Lesy.”

Other vocalists on Too Sad for the Public include Ana Egge, Rachelle Garniez, and Gabriel Kahane, with guest spots from instrumentalists Rayna Gellert, Chaim Tannebaum, Erik Friedlander, Steve Elson, and Jay Berliner.

Too Sad for the Public is out now. Watch the video for “Black River Falls” below.