For those who’ve been watching the rise of the dark carnival band, the Dust Bowl Faeries on the steampunk circuit over the past few years you may have noticed some avant-garde music videos being released by the band’s Film Faerie Lisa M. Thomas. One such video is their most recent music novella for the band’s hit song, “Candy Store.”
The recently released video (which is being coined as a “music novella”) was directed and produced by Thomas in late 2020. One of the first productions to take place in New York’s Hudson Valley after the onset of COVID-19, the production team restored the historic Mayflower candy shoppe in Catskill, NY to recreate the look and feel of the business as it was in the 1930’s when it first opened. The efforts pay off with more than just eye popping candy, but visuals that dance off the screen and pay homage to band leader, Ryder Cooley’s ancestry.
Structured around a traditional Yiddish folk song, Cooley, the band’s fearless faerie leader, learned the song from her own grandmother. The video much like the song recounts a fascinating and alluring Eastern European immigrant’s tale with added lyrics to flesh out the story. “My grandmother taught me the first verse of ‘Candy Store’ when I was a kid,” Cooley reminisces. “I have a good memory for anything morbid or morose, like twisted old faerie tales and nursery rhymes, so when I got my first accordion, the song just sort of just played itself.”
Thomas who’s been making visuals for the band since 2018 knew the first time she saw the Faeries perform Candy Store live that she wanted to make a video for them. “The song had such a great energy and always got the crowd going” Thomas recounts, “I knew making Candy Store was going to be epic because the story was so over the top. I lost a lot of sleep over how to deal with visually burning the candy store down, but in the end it really came together. In many ways all the videos I directed prior for the band was my warm up to getting Candy Store just right for them.”
To learn more about Thin Edge Films’ filmmaker, Lisa M. Thomas and The dark carnival band the Dust Bowl Faeries go to: http://www.thinedgefilms.com https://www.instagram.com/thinedgefims & http://dustbowlfaeries.com