Taproot’s Stephen Richards Talks New Video for ‘The Everlasting’

Taproot have just unveiled their video for the latest single ‘The Everlasting,’ which you can check out below. In the first part of our exclusive interview with Taproot frontman Stephen Richards, he spoke about the current health issues he’s battling. In our continuation of the interview below, Richards talks about the track ‘The Everlasting’ and the band’s vision for the video.

You guys are set to release the video for ‘The Everlasting’ – can you talk about the song lyrically?

Yeah it’s kind of difficult because ‘The Episodes’ the album itself it’s not necessarily fully a concept record, we just approached it in a different way. We wanted to come up with a story and write the lyrics first and accompany it with the music secondary so it’s almost like listening to a movie – the music is almost like a score. Basically ‘No Surrender’ it’s track five and it’s basically the beginning of following a second character.

We have three main characters in ‘The Episodes’ – our first release ‘No Surrender’ is basically following a character waking up in a crazy hotel room, who’s not sure what happened and trying to find a safe haven.
‘The Everlasting’ instead of being a continuation of that story, it’s a reset to a young boy waking up where he’s actually in a safe haven but wants to get out of the house where all the hell is going on around in the real world. It’s a parallel to the first release and it’s basically looking through the view of a young innocent child who doesn’t have any guilt or pain or anything that we all slowly gain through our lives – just looking at the world through a happier, more naïve outlook. No matter how bad things get, it doesn’t really matter to a kid because they have their whole future ahead of them it’s just looking at the mindset of a beautiful, innocent child.

How was the experience of shooting the video?

Shooting the video for me was a breeze because we had the concept in mind of it being from the music and the score and the story. I didn’t want it to be another – Taproot’s been doing this for twelve, thirteen years professionally, I didn’t want it to be another “Hey we’re standing in a warehouse performing.”

We wanted to tell more of a story and continue on the story from the ‘No Surrender’ video so it was more the idea to have the band’s cameo with a poster on the wall but the actors and characters do more of the story telling to make it more enticing to the people who have watched the first video. It’s definitely harder to follow and that’s the goal – kind of make it a David Lynch-y thing.

This is the first time I got a month at home with my two year-old boy so I actually wasn’t on set for the video. I think our drummer, since he lived in Chicago went by and saw the video shoot. Eric over at Victory Records who shoots the videos for us – I told him what we were looking for and how to tell the story and he just totally took it on his own and made it happen the way we wanted it and we’re all very, very happy with it.

Check Out Taproot’s Video for ‘The Everlasting’

Next: Taproot's Stephen Richards on His Battle With Seizures

Source: Taproot’s Stephen Richards Talks New Video for ‘The Everlasting’