Experimental funk/jam legends Lettuce have issued an eye-catching official video for the instrumental “Silence Is Golden” off latest album, Resonate.
The colorful, animated storybook visual was created by the Los Angeles-based team at Black Balloon Media. The video is directed by Brad Strickman, produced by Shane Strickman and illustrated by Carolyn Arcabascio.
Images from the video will be transformed into coloring book pages for fans to enjoy, with the first available to download here.
With this video, we want to take you on a visually stunning, colorful journey into a fantastic storybook-like world that invokes peace and inspires creativity. We want to make the connection resonate between ourselves, nature, and the spirit that binds us all together. Lett us present, ‘Silence is Golden.’
Lettuce Guitarist Adam “Shmeeans” Smirnoff.
Black Balloon Media previously worked on a video for Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” which is what attracted Lettuce to work with the company, seeing a similar style and approach for “Silence is Golden”
Smirnoff connected with the Black Balloon Media team and advised them on the song’s themes of music and nature intertwining and connecting all of us. This also led to discussing having the band members animated in the video and playing their instruments within nature, creating a wide variety of scenes – not just one setting, but instead, in all of nature.
From there, as we do with all projects, we put together some boards and a treatment. There was a little back and forth on the style, colors, and look of the band members. We brought on Carolyn Arcabascio to do a lot of the illustrations. We love her watercolor, painterly style and it fit the direction very well. We had worked with her previously on an animated video for Palisades “Erase the Pain.”
Brad Strickman, Creative Director
With the team together and boards and treatment approved, the team started building shots and assembling an edit. Since “Silence is Golden” appropriately has no lyrics, the video was approached a little differently.
We didn’t have to worry about sync as much as you would with a song with wall to wall singing. We still wanted them to be playing correctly and in time, but we had some leeway. In fact, we built a lot of the scenes without them playing at first, and then as the edit got finalized, we animated them to be more in sync with the locked timing. This gave us more flexibility. As it came together we would send them updated versions. They were loving it, so minor adjustments along the way, handling any notes they had and polished it as we went.
Brad Strickman, Creative Director
“Working on the art, it was amazing to me how Lettuce’s music already felt so visual,” adds the video’s illustrator Carolyn Arcabascio. “You can just imagine the colors as the song goes from dreamy and trance-like to energetic and explosive. A total dream project for an illustrator.”
Brad Strickman, director, also shares, “We really enjoyed bringing this video to life for Lettuce and their management team. The song has such a great vibe and, right from the beginning, we loved their concept of nature and music connecting us all.”
The connection of nature to music is essential to understand. The sound of the leaves swaying in the soft breeze along with the crickets and birds singing, can be very inspiring. This song represents a quiet place that resides in all of our minds that can bring peace to our souls. Lettuce meditate to the golden silence.
Lettuce drummer Adam Deitch
Black Balloon Media, in addition to Lettuce and Neil Young, has worked with Linkin Park, Disturbed, Bebe Rexha, Prince, Neffex, Palisades, Bad Bunny and Stone Temple Pilots, among many others.
Resonate, Lettuce’s seventh studio album, is a sonic continuation of the acclaimed sextet’s 2019 GRAMMY Award-nominated album Elevate, which earned Lettuce their first collective nomination in the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.
On Resonate, Lettuce continue to be celebrated boundary-pushing innovators nearly three decades into their lauded career, blurring the lines and smashing it up with jazz chords, psychedelic passages, big horns, strains of soul and go-go, hip-hop elements and a joyful, uplifting improvisational sound all their own. They also found inspiration from many of their idols, such as James Brown and Earth, Wind & Fire, for the new music. Resonate was helmed by esteemed producer and engineer Russ Elevado [D’Angelo, The Roots, Erykah Badu] and written and recorded during the same Colorado Sound Studio sessions for Elevate.