Premiere: Cary Morin’s message: When I Rise

Singer/songwriter’s video a family affair

Son of an Air Force officer, Cary Morin grew up in Montana in the ’70s, listening to music on the radio or chosen by other family members. It seems incongruous now, but the first song that Morin played (on the piano) and sang was a Chubby Checker song, in the first grade. A little later, he discovered Doug Kershaw and asked for a fiddle. It was all upward from there.

Today, the vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter has appeared on 18 recordings and won numerous awards in the blues, folk, songwriting and indigenous music categories, and is known for his fingerpicking-style guitar. He’s moved to Colorado, but tours extensively in the US, Europe, the UK and Japan, and his music is constantly evolving as he studies music and widens his influences.

Morin told Elmore about the birth of the video for “When I Rise.”

“When I Rise was the result of listening to [Alan] Lomax recordings and other vintage recordings. I’m fascinated with all sorts of music and love to dig for the roots. I wrote down some lines and started thinking of a character that was perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time and would be blamed for a crime he didn’t commit. When I did the preproduction for the song, the melody came from a simple guitar riff I had intended to perform with a band. I gave that to Kim Stone who produced that part of the CD, and he saw something different. We ended up recording the song live at eTown Hall Studio in Boulder, Colorado, with all of us standing around a microphone and Kim playing stand-up bass. Others present were Jay Forrest playing tambourine, Dexter Payne on harmonica, and Lionel Young playing fiddle. We only did two takes, and I’m pretty sure we used the first take. It all happened pretty quickly. Since we were all standing in a circle, we could all see each other play off of each other.

“When we got the mix back, my manager Celeste and I were thinking that the opening line that Lionel played was chilling. It was like hearing the music come up in the first scene of an old western movie at sunrise. That was all it took. I started writing the script and outlining the characters. After a festival show in Fort Collins last summer, I was sitting around with a bunch of friends in a backyard alley in Old Town Fort Collins. I told some of the crew that I have worked on videos with in the past about the story line idea for this song. My son was there too. We were suddenly all on board with this idea that we were going to make a little western movie in Montana. The idea of going to Montana was so that we could all go fishing while we were there. The budget for the filming/fishing trip got out of control, so were started thinking of locations closer to home and ended up filming most of it right here in town. The mountain shots with the horses were done at Beaver Meadows Resort not far from here; the rest of it at some ponds near the Poudre River here in town. My son played the role of the Young Man and everything else just seemed to fall into place. I did most of my scenes early because Celeste and I had a tour to do in Europe, the crew continued to shoot scenes while we were gone. We wrapped up shooting soon after we were back from our trip. I can check this video story off of the list of things I want to do in my lifetime!