“When I’m not performing songs with my band The Brooklyn Garden Club, I run a landscape business based in Brooklyn. Get it?”
“But here’s the thing…20 years ago my life was much different. An active alcoholic and intravenous drug user, 20 years ago I was sleeping in a homeless shelter in Berwick, Louisiana. For real. Lucky for me however, the proverbial amazing grace did in fact save the wretch. In an instant everything changed. In short, I had a spiritual awakening at the local Pentecostal Church which resulted in an ability to walk cold turkey away from drugs and alcohol.
Not long after, drawing on childhood work experiences I’d been trying hard to forget, I was gainfully employed as a part time gardener. And something else happened. The Church I mentioned asked me to join the choir and with that began the musical journey I’d never imagined possible. I was 27.
Which brings me to this latest project. A concept album of sorts—each song zeroes in on a specific cultivar. By that I mean a tree, a shrub, or a flower. My plant interactions began at about age 4, so metaphorically speaking it wasn’t much of a stretch.
Enter exhibit (A) ”Betula Nigra,’ the botanic name for a type of Birch tree. This particular Birch was a reminder that all was not well just because I’d gotten clean and sober. I had ‘issues’ and none of them disappeared the moment I stopped using. Ideas about romantic relationships for example were deeply skewed. As a result the new version of me, the one who didn’t get high, went from one tumultuous relationship to the next.
Until Betula Nigra called me out. Unlike her more famous fair-skinned sibling, ‘Betula Papyrifera’, Nigras’ bark was pockmarked and rutty. But where her sister may have been more beautiful; Nigra was stronger, more resilient, and grew to maturity very quickly. Basically, Betula had everything except maybe, perfect tits.
Me and Daniel (director) wanted a video that would work like the song—a non linear approach to a pretty straight forward narrative. So Daniel found the tree not far from his home deep in the Catskill mountains and we started there.
We had a couple GoPro’s and Daniel had the fancy camera, a Sony FS 100. For some of the aerial shots we tied helium balloons to a GoPro and then tied fishing line to that and reeled it out with a fishing rod.
To get me lift off the ground we used an electric winch which I happened to have because my landscape business needed one to lift plants onto a Manhattan rooftop. Then I got a hunter’s tree harness at a sporting goods store. The plan was to secure the winch to a branch high up in a tree and attach this my harness, which hid underneath my clothing. Pretty simple we thought…
After 10 or more failed attempts involving 3 set locations, setups and breakdowns, the winch wasn’t cooperating and we were ready to give up. Friends, hearing what we were up to, became concerned about my safety/ sanity and a few were texted that they’d rather we give up before something awful happened. In fact we were about to do just that when we got the idea to lighten the load by 10 lbs. A moment later I was flying like Peter Pan in a grade school theatre production. In fact I could only stay up for 4-5 minutes at a time before I started to lose consciousness.
The underwater shots were an afterthought. The swimming hole we used to shoot them in was one we’d used for post rehearsal dips. After a day running around the woods filming in the summer heat, we couldn’t wait to go for a swim.
Someone had the bright idea of filming me from underwater with the GoPro while I swam by fully clothed. The GoPro, if you don’t know, handles water supremely well. The vintage tux I was wearing..not so much. Almost instantly the seams on it disintegrated, and within minutes it was shredded…”
—Fire Dean
