Amercan singer-songwriter and musician Austin Crane has recorded three albums under the name Valley Maker. He has released his eponymous debut in 2010 and the sophomore full-length When I Was A Child in 2015, and then the latest one called Rhododendron which was released in 2018 via Frenchkiss Records.
He currently lives in Columbia, SC, where he is teaching and writing his PhD dissertation in Human Geography. Back in 2020, he’s back with a new video for the track “Mockingbird” which was directed, filmed and photographed by Joseph Kolean and Zach Gutierrez, incorporating Super 8 footage by Austin Crane.
Watch it below.
The artist explains about the track: ““I wrote Mockingbird within a week of moving to Columbia, SC, having just left my home of seven years in Seattle to return to the area and community I grew up in. It’s a song about trying to settle in while feeling quite unsettled. My wife, Megan, and I had just bought a small, historic house that needed (still needs!) a lot of work, and wanting to do something tangible and forward looking, I planted my favorite tree in the yard: a Japanese Maple. There’s a line in the song that acknowledges how I’ll “sit for a while and watch it grow,” as a way of accepting that season of uncertainty and transition. I guess when I wrote the song, I didn’t know how long I would be doing just that. So while Mockingbird was written a few months before the pandemic upended life as we knew it, the song resonates deeply, for me, with this strange season of life. Both the song and video meditate on memory, time and aging; they both try to embrace the uncertainty, absurdity and beauty of life; and they reflect a feeling of being in-between places and communities.”