Featuring a warm, full sound and a driving, foot-tapping rhythm, here is ‘Nowhere Else to Go’, the latest single from Nashville-based ELDR, also-known-as husband-and-wife duo Jameson Elder and Hanna Rae. There’s a clear chemistry between them and their voices complement one another beautifully, a real highlight of this tuneful song. The song is an effective blend of their individual musical styles, delivering engaging melody, powerful lyrics and some brilliantly fluid guitar-work. The found-footage styling of the video helps to create an aching nostalgia and an isolating sense of loss , right up to the end when the couple are reunited and then walk home together, hand in hand.
Elder says of the song and video: “Hanna started writing this song on her own. It’s about someone who is struggling to find hope. The opening line, ‘Nothing is as it was / How do we begin again / Every sight is a stranger / In an unknown land,’ hits that point home pretty early on. But, like many of our songs we want to leave a thread of hope. There is a second voice that comes in towards the end to remind the narrator that ‘the dark won’t get to take its claim.’ The music video for our ‘Nowhere Else To Go’ was filmed in East Nashville by Nashville filmmaker Ives Salbert. Salbert pitched the original concept for the music video to depict the claustrophobic and monotonous feeling that many of us felt during the pandemic. The video follows the trajectory of the song with a clear shift that pivots from that closed-in feeling to a sense of hope and freedom.”
After meeting in Nashville and sharing a love of music in 2013, Elder and Rae were married in 2016. Though they found love together, they continued to follow their own musical paths, each releasing well-received solo material. Like many musicians, the pair found that the lockdowns of 2020 transformed life, shutting down some opportunities but also creating the space and time to finally collaborate properly together. Rae shares: “For years, people would come up to us after a show and ask when we were planning on releasing music together. We’d just laugh and say, ‘Oh, one of these days.’ We talked about it a lot, but we just never fully dove in. There is a weird tension to co-creating with the person you love. It’s different because you don’t get to just set aside whatever conversation you had that morning. We had to learn how to create together.” Learn they did. The result is new EP ‘Nowhere Else to Go’, which draws on that range of emotions, highs and lows experienced by many during the pandemic. Let this instantly likable song be your gateway into the new EP. Enjoy.
Many thanks to ELDR for an exclusive Q&A about the new video.
Tell us what this song is about and what inspired it.
Hanna: I wrote this song about a year into the pandemic. I think there was just this overwhelming feeling of loss and uncertainty. So the song starts there. Slowly you get little dashes of hope mixed in. The bridge is where the phrase, “nowhere else to go,” turns into a rallying cry.
Whose idea was the video treatment? What was the original premise for the video? Who directed the clip?
Jameson: Ives Salbert directed and connected most of the video. He had the idea to show some of the tension, the monotony, of being stuck in one place for too long. I think the bikes were our idea, but I don’t really remember. We just thought that would be fun and would bring a sense of freedom to the second half of the song.
Where did you film it?
Hanna: All in East Nashville. Part of it in a trailer in someone’s backyard and part down near Shelby Park.
Any great stories from the video shoot?
Jameson: Well… Hanna hadn’t ridden a bike in at least 10 years, so that was definitely fun! I was really proud, she didn’t fall at all!
Hanna: It rained off and on the whole day. Luckily, it only rained when we were filming inside or driving to the next location so that was a relief!
What is your favorite part of the video?
Jameson: I love the shot where we’re walking away holding hands. It’s really symbolic of how our relationship fared during the pandemic. There were some incredibly hard moments, but overall I think we’ve become a lot closer because of it.
What’s next for ELDR?
Hanna: We working on some shows for next spring!
