Brad Spurgeon's Blog

PARIS – The other day I was searching through my personal computer archive for something completely unrelated when I noticed an MP3 file that had the name “Tangled Up In Blue.” That being one of my favorite Bob Dylan Songs, from my favorite Bob Dylan album, Blood on the Tracks, and the MP3 being clearly something that I had myself recorded once upon a time when I was myself tangled up in blue (this was in my 2010 folder), I decided to open it. What I found surprised me!

That last sentence is a classic “click bait” exercise of the kind I hate. And I usually avoid clicking on any headline that is clearly click bait, even if it is in a reputable web site. Here, I put it there not as bait, but just because it was true. I opened this 2010 recording that I had done in my living room in 2010 of a song that I had forgotten I ever even sang. I love the song, but I think I always felt that it was too long to sing in an open mic or solo stage performance in a bar. So I just kind of forgot about ever performing it again.

“Tangled Up In Blue” cover by Brad Spurgeon

But I had taken the time to learn it, and I had decided I would have fun recording it one night in my living room, probably on one of my Dictaphones used to record interviews for my journalism. In any event, when I listened to the MP3, I thought that my execution of the song – with what seemed like no errors in the lyrics – and a certain emotional appropriateness, was something that I would really like to share with people.

“Crazy Lady” music video and song by Brad Spurgeon

But the idea of posting an mp3 just did not sit well in this age of easy-to-make videos. So I decided to throw together a quick video for the song, just to get it out there. At first trying to use some of my own film footage from 2010, and personal photographs, and a few other simple, direct, nonsensical ways of stringing together a background to the song, I decided to check out the freely available stock footage of rights-free video that I could find on the internet. I had used this method for my own song, “Crazy Lady” — which I also post above as a reminder — so I knew it could work. I then found all this fabulous footage that really seemed to match the mood of “Tangled Up In Blue” and within a couple of hours I had finished the video and posted it on Facebook.

It reminded me that we do not always have to fret about and pain ourselves over the idea of how terribly difficult and complicated our efforts to create a music video has to be. As that old advertisement used to say: “Just do it!”