TAPROOT: 'The Everlasting' Video Released

"The Everlasting", the new video from the Ann Arbor, Michigan hard rock band TAPROOT, can be seen below. The clip is an ongoing story from TAPROOT's previous music video, "No Surrender".

"The Everlasting" comes off TAPROOT's new album, "The Episodes", which was released on April 10 via Victory Records. The CD was produced by Tim Palatan, who previously worked with the group on 2010's "Plead The Fifth".

Speaking to Loudwire, TAPROOT frontman Stephen Richards stated about the "The Everlasting" video, "Shooting the video for me was a breeze because we had the concept in mind of it being from the music and the score and the story. I didn't want it to be another 'Hey, we're standing in a warehouse performing'[-type clip]. We wanted to tell more of a story and continue on the story from the 'No Surrender' video, so it was more the idea to have the band's cameo with a poster on the wall but the actors and characters do more of the story telling to make it more enticing to the people who have watched the first video. It's definitely harder to follow and that's the goal — kind of make it a David Lynch-y thing."

He continued, "This is the first time I got a month at home with my two-year-old boy, so I actually wasn't on set for the video. I think our drummer, since he lived in Chicago, went by and saw the video shoot. Eric over at Victory Records who shoots the videos for us, I told him what we were looking for and how to tell the story and he just totally took it on his own and made it happen the way we wanted it and we're all very, very happy with it."

"The Episodes", nearly six years in the making, is a complexly developed concept album. Guitarist Mike DeWolf told Loudwire about the CD, "It's a life journey kind of concept about growing up and making choices and the effects of the choices you make in your life — one way or the other. It's got three main characters and it's something that hopefully each person can take something different away from — something that can be special to each person individually."

Regarding the songwriting process for the new album, DeWolf said, "It came together a thousand times faster than any other album. We did everything completely different. We had this idea — 'What if we wrote a story, broke it into ten pieces, and then wrote the music around that?' Instead of the opposite because the music always comes pretty easy to us but the lyrics usually take a little while longer. We were kind of getting the hard part out of the way right off the bat and having fun with it all the rest of the way. It came together, literally, in 15 days — written and demoed."