MIRANDA LAMBERT: Commentary on Official Music Video for “Settling Down” (Audio)
“Settling Down” is a very personal song to me. I wrote it sort of at a time where I just met my husband and we were getting married and I hadn’t been on the road as much so when it came time to shoot this video not only are we in a pandemic year, we have to be safe about it but I wanted it to special because of the lyric content and the timing of the song. We decided to shoot it at my farm in Tennessee, my happy place. Trey Fanjoy is a longtime friend of mine and directed almost every video of my career so when we posed the idea to her, I had sort of a scale down, country down home plan in my mind and Trey took it and made it this beautiful epic fairytale so it was kind of both mixed in one. I got to have my first love interest I’ve ever had in a video in 17 years of making videos, which is my husband and he was there and he was cute and he was free so we used him.
The horse in the video is my horse Gibson. He and I have been on a journey together. He’s very strong and powerful and I’m still a pretty green rider. I had picked out my other horse Leeani to ride in this video because I trust her a lot. She’s safe but Trey had loved the look of Gibson and I was kind of fighting it because I was a little scared. I decided to give it a try and I got on Gibson and practiced for a while. I took it more as a hurdle that I need to get over anyway and now I had an excuse. So I ended up riding Gibson in the video and I think the tension of me being a little afraid actually worked in my favor but Gibson and I just had a really… we had a bonding moment that we really needed to have. It was a beautiful video all around. I had a lot of special things with my husband, my horse and my happy place and a song that I wrote with two friends. It really is one of those videos that’s like once in a lifetime.
I have a really great team around me. My glam team is A plus. Tiffany Gifford, Moani Lee and Johnny Lavoy He and the girls always kind of collaborate with Trey about what they feel like imaging should be for certain projects but the three of them put their heads together with Trey and I sort of stepped out and was like show me the final boards because they’re so creative and so great at making me look the way I need to look for certain things. Obviously if you’re going to ride a horse, you’re going to need a cape. That’s just a given.
The special moments that happened on the shoot were me riding Gibson and really learning to trust him and my husband’s debut on camera was this video so watching him look at me and be filmed doing it, it felt really.. I was just really proud of him and was really thankful that he was willing to put himself out there for art’s sake. Just sharing that moment together, I’ve never really let anyone in to my personal life that much over my career and this is kind of the most I have ever shown anyone sort of behind the scenes of my real life. You saw my real cabin, my real husband and our farm but I think it was time and it felt right. Brendan is learning to fish. He moved to Nashville from New York City last spring so he’s getting his fishing game going pretty good.
