This video has been sitting around half-edited for years, so I finally finished it up a couple of days ago.
It’s time to put this out - despite my haircut and weight at the time.
Don’t Change The Subject
This was the only time the band worked on assignment.
My friend Mike Stutz was making a documentary about suicide, called Don’t Change the Subject.
I know that doesn’t exactly sound like a laff-fest, but believe me that it’s not a downer.
It explores the extra stigma of suicide on top of death, and has the goal of getting people to talk instead of shutting up - whether somebody is feeling suicidal or a person has lost a loved one to suicide.
The movie is available on Vimeo - watch it!
In the movie, Mike tasks several artists to come up with material breaking the mold about suicide: Dancers, sitcom writers room, cartoonist, commedia dell’arte troupe, standup comic, and a band.
That’s where The Bigfellas came in.
We had a short deadline, which can be a little scary but just as liberating.
You don’t have time to overthink anything.
We made two songs for the project - Always Be and The Suicide Song.
We went into the studio with little more than some chords.
So after strumming a demo at the studio, Shay went into the big room to lay down drums while I’m scribbling out lyrics.
All very bang-bang and we quickly had these two songs done in a day.
It may have been the most satisfying day we’ve ever spent in a studio.
Not a Joke
The song can seem flippant, and maybe that’s for you to decide, but not to me.
For starters, the assignment was to not do traditional sad or cloying music about suicide, so a bouncy 4/4 beat was the place to begin.
It was just the kind of English music hall ditty that Shay, Paul McCartney, and I all love.
Lyrically, yeah it’s a little in your face listing the methods and grisly results of killing yourself.
That was the point.
Suicide isn’t sad music or faux tragi-romantic Sylvia Plath stuff.
It’s real, so that was the point.
Also, the bridge has just about the only thing I could think to tell somebody contemplating suicide to come down off the ledge: "Why the end? You can wait and kill yourself tomorrow."
By the way, the U.S. Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is 988.
Make sure everybody in your life knows it; whether they’re suicidal or supporting a friend.
Making the Video
The various art got integrated into the movie.
The Bigfellas did two parts - going to a shoot in downtown LA to make the staged video and rooftop parts.
Notably, a lot of porn movies shoot in that building, so it’s nice to be so close to fame.
The other live section was from a show at Molly Malone’s in the Fairfax district of LA ... a great bar that Shay and I both frequented in our youth.
It was a fun crowd, but when we get enthusiastic crowds we tend to get excited and speed up.
That’s all fine in the moment, but hard to edit.
Cutting and timing that to a slower recorded version doesn’t make life easy for whatever poor sap has to edit this.
Mike put together an all-star crew for his documentary, which means that this video has that same creative team and crew.
Mike Stutz has been producing, writing, and directing TV for 3 decades now.
Cinematographer Jay Lafayette is an Emmy winner.
Editor Gail Yasanuga has put together 40 studio and indie movies; she also did some early edits that exist in this video - so maybe we can proudly say we are the low point of her distinguished career.
The video has moves; the "Bohemian Rhapsody" dark shots, rooftop dicking around at sunset, good live shots.
I let this sit around for too long.
If nothing else, I’m really glad to move this from a hard drive where nobody will watch it to YouTube where few people will watch it.
Shay Bell
But the main thing that I think of when I see this video is my friend Shay.
He died in 2024; not from suicide FYI.
It’s great just to see him again doing Shay things.
Laughing, dancing around, his trademark triplet snare hits - right before the whistling solo.
The triplet makes me smile thinking of him.
And yes, the whistling.
Shay was a world-class whistler.
We could only fit that into so many songs but it’s a huge part of our favorite "Dollar for Every Dime."
It sounded like the "bluebird of happiness" from Song of the South coming from the throat of a longtime Irish smoker.
And he nailed whistling solos every time while drumming live.
It was an unheralded talent, that I especially appreciate looking back on it.
I inserted three short shots from Shay and I on a beach in his Irish hometown of Wexford.
We have another documentary filmmaking friend, Rick Bowman, who shot Shay and me in Ireland in 2023.
Here it tied together the opening and close.
Rick is working on the documentary of that trip, the band, and our last albums (tracked but not finished or released) - which feels like a 2027 release.
But meanwhile, I am so very thankful to have so much footage of my friend - and also video evidence of how fun this band has been.
