Book Of James
On Ditch Plains beach in Montauk NY, director Matt Amato filmed newly-formed We Are Augustines (from remnants of band Pela) playing a midnight jam session around a flickering bonfire. This scene would later become a large part of “Book of James,” the first music video off the band’s debut album, Rise Ye Sunken Ships. The project is an epic and intimate portrait of a troubled soul based on lead singer Bill McCarthy’s brother James (for whom the song was also written). The deeply personal account of the song’s composition and creation is detailed on the We Are Augustines website.
Naturally, with such a meaningful piece, McCarthy was cautious about approaching someone to interpret the story behind the song. After considering some forty directors, the Masses’ own Matt Amato was chosen to undertake the direction of the video. Struck by both the “Born in the USA” Springsteen-esque intensity of the song and the band’s earnest intentions (realized upon their first meeting at the Brooklyn Inn), Matt felt pressured (in a good way) to deliver a video worthy of the song.
He enlisted actor and friend Brady Corbet (who, in addition to being featured in the upcoming films Martha Marcy May Marlene and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, also appears in Matt’s Ima Robot video) to star. In every shot he gives a powerfully contemplative performance as a lost soul roaming around outer Manhattan. And, as FILTER magazine recently noted about the piece, ”you don’t need to be a New Yorker to appreciate the beauty and potential magnitude in a journey across the boroughs following a traumatic event.”
As the anthemic instrumentation of the song drives on, the young man’s journey persists, eventually interwoven with McCarthy’s memoriam-like journey to retrace the man’s footsteps. Although the ballad-like song is one to be sung to the rafters, the quiet intimacy of the video shows, in Matt’s words, “how through our memory and our work we attempt to honor the struggle of our beloved and the lives they led.” Though the video itself should be evidence enough of this, Matt describes how many aspects of the project seemed to exemplify this very concept. For instance, while filming on the beach in Montauk, they happened to cross paths with several paper lanterns that had been launched up into the black, starry night. As the band and crew watched these lanterns floating up into the Milky Way, a wave of catharsis swept over them that seemed to encourage the healing process, leaving an atmosphere that’s certainly palpable in the final product.