On Thursday, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit released a music video for the track “Only Children” off the group’s latest album, Reunions. “Only Children” marks the first music video for a Reunions track, coming from Isbell who is not typically prone to visual accompaniment.
After months of prolonged isolation, subsiding only on I So Lounging streams with his wife Amanda Shires and friend Peter Levin, Isbell is finally back out on the road. Starting Thursday, Isbell and the Unit will perform a four-night run at The Caverns in Pelham, TN for the Above Ground Concert Series, then kick off the Live From The Drive-In series at Ameris Bank Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, GA on October 16th. The husband-and-wife team will then pair up for a run of drive-in and pod concerts in North and South Carolina in November.
Rather than a staged performance video featuring Isbell and his backing band playing in a studio or in front of a green screen, the video for “Only Children” takes on a much more cinematic approach. With the use of two talented, young female actors, the music video’s writer and director Kurt Simpson instead personifies the story that “Only Children” tells about adventurous, and oftentimes dangerous, youth.
Part Pulp Fiction and part American Graffiti, the music video follows two girls as they covet a luminescent backpack that literally fell off the back of a truck. The whole sequence of events—from riding bikes down an empty street to hanging out in a gas station parking lot—is something immediately identifiable to the legions of suburban youth who Isbell speaks for.
Watch the new music video for “Only Children” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – “Only Children” (Official Music Video)
[Video: Jason Isbell]