The Stray Birds - "Best Medicine" (Official Video)

The official video for The Stray Birds, "Best Medicine," out on Yep Roc Records.
Directed by Jacob Keeler.
Available now at iTunes / smarturl.it/SBBMD,
Amazon / smarturl.it/SBAMZN and the
Yep Roc Store / bit.ly/STRYB.
The Stray Birds have been flying high since the 2012 release of their critically acclaimed self-titled album. Two years, hundreds of gigs, and thousands of highway miles later, the genre-melding acoustic trio makes its Yep Roc Records debut. Known for their songwriting, instrumental virtuosity and gorgeous three-part harmony singing, their most cohesive and ambitious album to date, Best Medicine, is out October 21.
The band - multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Maya de Vitry, Oliver Craven, and Charlie Muench - hails from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. All three are classically-trained musicians who’ve been making music of all kinds since childhood (before they reconnected through the local music scene, de Vitry and Muench first met in middle school orchestra); however, they were also all raised with a steady diet of music ranging from pioneers like The Carter Family and Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys to the joyous invention of The Beatles and The Band, to the groundbreaking artistry of Jimi Hendrix.
Where their previous releases (aside from the 2013 EP, Echo Sessions, which consisted of covers of songs penned by Townes Van Zandt, The Louvin Brothers, Jimmie Rodgers, Nanci Griffith, and Susanna Clark) consisted nearly entirely of songs that the band members wrote individually while remaining close to home, for Best Medicine, the band’s primary songwriters, Maya and Oliver, wrote new, original material inspired by their last two and a half years on the road.
In addition to being their strongest, most personal, and most authentic album to date, Best Medicine is an album of firsts for these three musicians: it is the band’s first full-length album where Charlie Muench sings lead on a song, a jaunty, fiddle-laced version of the traditional tune“Pallet,” which has long been a fan favorite at shows. It was also the first song Maya and Oliver sang together back in 2010, making its inclusion on Best Medicine a moment in which the band’s
Although The Stray Birds choose to focus on folk music’s sounds, harmonies, and tones, rather than its tradition of politically-conscious lyrics, Best Medicine includes two songs that would do Pete Seeger proud: Craven’s “Simple Man,” a heartbreaking song, reminiscent of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads, told from the perspective of a down on his luck farmer who prays he won’t live to see the next sunrise, and de Vitry’s “Black Hills,” a moody song, anchored by clawhammer banjo, about a dark spot in American history - it was inspired by a 2012 National Geographic article titled “In the Shadow of Wounded Knee.”While the bulk of the original material for Best Medicine was written with The Stray Birds in mind, the two songs that close the album come from an earlier time but find a home in the hands of the close-knit trio. Craven’s aforementioned “Simple Man”, and de Viry’s “Might Rain”-the first song she ever wrote- a song for which Muench lays down the bass and picks up the clawhammer banjo in a lulling, old-time inspired arrangement.