I was digging through an old editing hard drive and found a handful of songs that Curt Vernon played the last time he came to visit, back in the fall of 2009. This is the first one I’m putting up, and there are more coming.
If you’ve been around here a while you already know Curt. He’s the 6’9″ and ridiculously happy guy I met on a mission trip to Florida, who at the time was living out of a ’92 Celica, and whose songs I ended up putting on my own website because I thought more people needed to hear them.
This one is “Rebel Bride.” I liked the song enough that I’d already shot a proper music video for it a couple of years back, so this is the stripped down version: one guy, one guitar, no second take.
We shot it in an empty parking lot at night, which is where the name of this little series comes from. There’s one streetlight doing all the work, some closed storefronts glowing way off in the background, and that’s the whole setup. Black and white was not a style choice so much as a decision about what was actually salvageable at that light level, but it turned out to suit him.
Curt writes about being the bride in the old prophets and the Song of Songs sense: the unfaithful one who keeps running and keeps getting chased down anyway. It’s not a comfortable song. His church puts a warning above the link to his music that says the lyrics may cause conviction leading to repentance, and honestly that’s about the most accurate description of his catalog anybody has managed.
You can hear the rest of the songs from that night, along with his whole album, on Curt’s page here. The album is free. The other two from this batch are “Pornography Will Murder You” and “Onward Christian Soldiers”.