Premiere: Claudia Gibson cherishes her grandfather’s story with ‘The Fields of Chazy’ video

“Grandpa died when I was young,” sings Claudia Gibson. Reedy instruments blow in the wind, a magnificent choir that haunts behind Gibson’s feathered lead vocal. With “The Fields of Chazy,” the titular cut to her new album, out now, the singer-songwriter cherishes her grandfather Joe’s story, having been born in 1881 in Chazy, New York, “a tiny North Country hamlet on the shores of Lake Champlain,” Gibson describes.

As it goes, the tale is that Joe was 33 when he “lost his first wife Albina and spent the next ten years working farms and planting apple trees before marrying my grandmother,” the performer shares with B-Sides & Badlands. In 2016, Gibson made the trek to Chazy for the “first time” and “was astounded to come across the apple trees my Grandpa Thibodeau planted, nearly 100 years later. My primary memory of my grandfather was of him playing old-time Acadian songs on the accordion in his upstate NY kitchen while I danced.”

“Their bond was strong enough to bear the hard times and the trials they shared,” sings Gibson, her voice light and airy. “But 1915 winter came, and his love could not save her.” With the power of a lark, Gibson crafts the melody with a heaving pulse, as though adorned with Grandpa Joe’s frosty living breath.

As she winds through the story, she alights upon her experience in witnessing the beauty of expansive fields and trees. “The twisted ancient apple trees, the sweet fruit of his legacy,” she observes. “Yes, this my Grandpa left to me, these verdant fields of Chazy.”

With the accompanying music video, premiering today, Claudia Gibson centers herself in the Chazy fields. The land seems to sigh in harmony around her, allowing the song to reach a new height with invaluable emotional currency. Gibson weaves in photographic relics of both her family and the locals in town to give the visual further significance in the scope of the universe.

Watch the “The Fields of Chazy” video below.

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