Premiere: Taylor Kopp finds peace in nature with debut video, ‘Mountain Highway Line’
The folk singer-songwriter truly impresses with his debut outing.
It can take absolute mayhem for you to appreciate the life and beauty surrounding you. It swells and throbs, and we, modern day creatures, go about our day and pay little mind. Folk singer-songwriter Taylor Kopp serves up a reminder of the sheer majesty of nature, turning his debut song into a cinematic piece of art with an accompanying visual ⏤ premiering today on B-Sides & Badlands. A delicate, plaintive song, “Mountain Highway Line” backdrops a serene countryside, sweeping forests lacing a tiny lake on Mt. Hood, just a ways outside of Portland. “Well this winter’s been long / It’s gone on and on,” he whispers through an acoustic guitar’s tender teardrops. Those words seem prescient now, as the world is locked away and gasping to survive.
He continues, eyeing a more personal tragedy, “And my family’s still reeling / From my brother being gone / But my love for you is an old folk song / To rest my head upon…” Kopp’s voice is both angelic and made of the earth’s rich mud; he lets the images fall as the snow in the visual, fluffy and sweet. Even on their own merits, the lyrics soothe right to the bone. “From that ridge out in Harney County / Where I can see for miles around me / I take you down that mountain high tree line,” he sings, painting in soft, vivid brushes. “To the winding river, hallelujah / Ask her for it, she’ll give it to you / Good luck finding that kind of thing around here tonight…”
The video ⏤ shot, directed, and edited by Dennis Fitzgerald, alongside Nate Smith handling art direction and location scouting ⏤ was filmed last September and carries with it a timeless shine. “[It is a] special place I’ve been visiting for years, great swimming in the summertime. A couple of my best buds are pro filmmakers, and we decided to make a weekend camping trip out of it,” Kopp explains over email. “As we drove up the mountain on the first day. it started snowing. The lake is at about 5,000 feet, so at first we were a bit nervous about the roads: would we be able to make it out? But we settled in and just tried to capture as much of the beauty as we could. In practically all of those scenes, we were freezing our asses off. But watching the video now, I love that we got the snow. It says something, maybe, that the sunlight couldn’t have.”
“Mountain Highway Line” anchors Kopp’s forthcoming album, Found, out everywhere May 1.
Watch below:
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what a great song. Reminds me of Townes, Gillian Welch, Iron and Wine. beautiful place too.
Hi Bill! Thanks so much for checking out the video. You just named 3 of my biggest heroes, that made my day. Cheers. -Taylor