Video Analysis: Rusted Root – Send Me On My Way

This video accompanies the song ‘Send Me on My Way’ performed by Rusted Root. The music produced by Rusted Root is more commonly categorised as Alternative Rock however they have also have said to be influenced by Native Americans and Indians. This is clearly visible throughout the video, mainly through the costumes that are worn by the band in the video. These are things such as animal skins and blankets etc. There are also traces of Native American influence in the instruments that the artists use such as drums and recorders etc. The appearance of the band themselves can also give genre characteristics from Alternative Rock as they have the ‘hippie-like’ appearance and a sort of ‘rugged’ look that people often associate with Alternative Rock.
During the entirety of the video we can see a lot of links between the lyrics of the song and the visuals that we see in the video. One example of this from the very beginning of the video where the lyric ‘On my way,’ is repeated over and over again, there are camera shots of a character taking a car journey through the middle of the desert, this could imply that the character in this sequence is going on a journey that is directly narrative parallel to the lyrics. There is also a lyric in the song that says ‘And how we will run away’. This is directly matched to the visuals that we, the audience, see in the video of the whole band walking and running across hilltops and mountains.
We can also see through the whole video that there are clear relationships between the music and the visuals in the video. We can see this mainly through the way that in the video the artists are playing their instruments and this obviously matches the song that accompanies the video. These two factors of the music video also have a relationship as the music that is being played is very lively and has an upbeat tempo; this matches the bands dancing on the mountain top, which is also very lively and upbeat.
Throughout the video there are lots of close ups of the artists in the band and this helps them get noticed and also put their face out into the world and get them to be more popular. The video also contains the notion of looking where the character at the beginning of the video looks at the door and then we see the door accompanied with the lyric ‘Send me on my way’. The video is a mixture of both performance and narrative based.
I like the way this video is set in an unusual setting and the band are playing on an open mountain top and am likely to use an unusual setting in a video of my own, I do not like that the narrative part of this video as it was very confusing and am likely to use a more clear narrative.