Premiere: Alice Howe digs into vulnerability with new video, ‘What We Got is Gold’

There is a majestic beauty that pops on the cover of Linda Ronstadt‘s 1977 album, Simple Dreams. The lush, yet somehow granular, amber color palette only serves to accentuate Ronstadt and her posed gaze to something just out of reach. Her expression is both curious and guarded; her posture angular and relaxed. But there arises a vulnerability that winks of what the record contains, songs like “Blue Bayou” and “I Will Never Marry,” a duet with Dolly Parton. A visual storyteller simply capturing what was already there, palpable and fresh, videographer Jim Shea (who also photographed Bonnie Raitt, Elton John and The Eagles) excavates and highlights the stark simplicity of any given moment. He’s got a magical lens, but his work is as reliant on the subject matter as much as the craft itself.

Modern folk scribe and musician Alice Howe turns to Shea’s awe-inspiring approach for the visual of “What We Got is Gold,” premiering today. It’s a heartwarming yarn of love, the kind that shimmers as gold woven in the floors of heaven, and the one-take clip lingers upon Howe and her striking resilience and charm on camera. “The night is louder than it’s been before / I hear it knocking on my walls and doors,” she casts her heart into the flickering flames, licking the early morning light quiet for a few more seconds. “Saying soon enough it’s time to go / But these precious hours I keep you close.”

The warmth ricochets from a deep, plentiful well in her bones, and in keeping the focus narrow, the music video is like peering directly into the heart-strung walls of her soul. “The original plan for the music video was to shoot me performing the song from many different angles, in different lights, with guitar, without, far away, close up. We spent about 10 hours shooting, and I must have performed the song 60 times,” Howe writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “But no matter how many times I did it, I didn’t tire of it. I just kept getting deeper into the song, feeling my way through it and entering that intimate, vulnerable space in which I had written it almost a year before. And toward the end of the day, we got this one take that put all the others to shame. There was no need to cut away to a different shot, because everything I wanted to say was all right there.”

Her careful consideration of each syllable rings as the Liberty Bell, crystal, clear and confident. “If the papers would all print old news, they’d say I’m still in love with you / Let the years go by, it remains the same / What we got is gold, and what’s its worth won’t change,” she sings. Even in such levelheaded assertiveness, there is a poetic delicacy through which she unearths further context to soften the haze. Out of Boston, Howe has left quite a mark on the Americana and folk scenes this year, and here, she cements herself as a beacon and one who not only cherishes tradition and pushes the needle forward.

“What We Got is Gold” is an essential cut to Howe’s debut album, Visions, out everywhere now.

Watch below:

Photo Credit: Jim Shea

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