Premiere: Seth Samuelson Cocquit waxes nostalgic about the past in ‘Old Timer’ video

When I ventured out into the wilderness last summer, during the first wave of COVID-19, I was struck by a kind of beauty I had taken for granted. Even more, I had totally forgotten about it. I didn’t have cell service (literally), and I was left with my thoughts. I had nothing but time. Time to breathe in the fresh air. Time to bask in the hot summer sun peaking through the green canopy of trees. I couldn’t believe what I had missed. With his new song “Old Timer,” the video for which premieres today, Americana storyteller Seth Samuelson Cocquit not only honors the older generation but pauses his life to enjoy the life pulsating around his feet.

“He said our family plot / Well that’s where us paupers lay because / You can’t buy your way to heaven with a rich man’s grave,” Cocquit reminisces on the bridge, his favorite section, reflecting upon something his grandfather once said. “Lord willing I’ll be buried up on that hill someday / The hayfields blowing and the oak trees sing.”

“Old Timer” is like a black and white photograph. Its image is blurry, yet there is such a ferocious life jumping from the frame that is nearly indescribable. “I sing about the family cemetery,” Cocquit tells B-Sides & Badlands over email. “That’s a very deep part of the song, lyrically for me, and a high point musically, too. Like, have you ever just sat and listened to the wind blowing through the trees and think about how we’re all connected? Yeah… that’s one of those things you just write or comes out and you’re like, ‘Oh, damn.’ There’s been a couple nights where I sang that and got a little emotional.”

In the age of smart phones and various other black mirrors, it can be quite easy to be distracted and lose the plot a little bit. In the accompany visual, a compilation of home video footage, dated 1989, Cocquit is “floating through time,” as he sings, with an overwhelming nostalgia flooding the senses. “There was six hours of footage I had to condense down to three minutes, so that was daunting. Luckily the pandemic gave me plenty of nothing to do, so that helped. It was actually my idea. It just made sense. We had just gotten all the VHS footage converted over to a digital format.”

Cocquit also mixes brand new footage, filmed out on his family farm in Geneseo, Illinois — “the same place the vintage footage is filmed,” he says. Such an approach gives even more emotional weight, stressing the relentless hand of time and the circles of life. “They are treasures, really. A lot of the folks in the video are family, including my mom, my uncle, the old timer himself, my grandma, sister, cousins, aunt, family friends. Just amazing to have that around if I ever want to go back and get all nostalgic. Oh, and then there’s two-year-old me hopping in the combine with my granddad.”

Watch below:

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