Durham, North Carolina’s The Pinkerton Raid pushes at the borders of folk, Americana, and indie rock to craft a sound for dreamers around a campfire. Critics have heard echoes of disparate influences — from Neil Young and The Band to Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
Sprouting from the songwriting and vocals of Jesse James DeConto, the quartet is rounded out by Fleming Talton on drums, Derek Skeens on bass, and Luis Rodriguez on lead guitar, trumpet, and keys. The outfit has shared stages with Illiterate Light, The Ballroom Thieves, Noah Gundersen, Lowland Hum, and The Collection — whose songwriter David Wimbish produced the band’s fourth full-length album Where the Wildest Spirits Fly.
Set to arrive in 2022, the group is currently at work on their upcoming fifth album titled The Highway Moves The World, which has already caught the attention of music media tastemakers. Today the band premieres their video for “The Magical Flying Rowan Tree.” This is what DeConto had to say about it.
“I noticed that Eleni Chandriotou had done some animation work for my friends in The Collection — their songwriter David Wimbish has been our producer the past few years. I reached out to her because I thought her whimsical style would fit well with a story about a kid who protects his family from the darkness with his powerful joy. I told Eleni about the myths of the magical rowan tree and how I wanted an adolescent superhero character to embody the magical powers of the tree. She said she’d been wanting to try an animation in the style of the feature film ‘The Book of Kells.’ I thought that sounded perfect because that movie narrates some of the ancient spirituality that I wanted to capture in the song and the video.
“It’s a really personal song to me, and I hope people can connect with it at the level of human relationships but also as an epic fantasy that can transport us somewhere else. I’m a big fan of Tolkien, you know?”
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