Gaslight Anthem Follow Life of a Record in ‘Handwritten’ Short Film

Gaslight Anthem have made the most of the video format to tell a story with their new short film for the song ‘Handwritten.’ Drummer Benny Horowitz came up with the concept of the cyclical tale of a record’s life cycle and then handed things off to director Kevin Slack to shoot the story.

Horowitz tells AbsolutePunk.net, “The original concept stemmed from an idea I had about following the life of a record. How these inanimate objects hold such sway in people’s lives, and how something that meant so much to someone can mean so little to someone else. And vice versa. Records have always been a huge part of my life in many ways, and I often stare at them and wonder what their story is. This idea was a way for me to tell their story.”

In the clip, a musician takes a song he came up with from the garage to the stage one evening where a young couple in the audience enthusiastically embraces the track. After getting such a strong reaction, the song is pressed into a record, which the girl later finds in the record store and buys for her boyfriend with a note sharing how much that moment in time meant to them.

Eventually the couple part when the young man leaves home and he leaves the vinyl on the record player as his final memory. The man’s father finds the dusty vinyl and passes it on to a neighbor boy to get him into music. Once that boy grows to a man, he loads up his vinyl to sell to a record store, where the original musician, now an old man, rediscovers the song he laid down all those years ago.

Slack says that even though the video tells a good portion of the tale, they have the idea of creating a longer film version that includes dialogue, an original score, and more of a narrative without the prerequisite inclusion of the Gaslight Anthem members in it.

“I’m excited to see the life that the film takes on,” says Slack. “As someone who wants to make feature films for a living, I’m much more attracted to a narrative than watching a band perform their song, so this whole idea of doing a film version was really exciting to me.” Horowitz added that there will be more of the film surfacing in the “not so distant future.”

Watch Gaslight Anthem’s ‘Handwritten’ Video