Video Premiere: “Little Lake Turnaround” by Brad Fielder

Norman's resident roots blues weirdo goes fishing for analog gold in absurdist lead single to forthcoming album.

written by Evan Jarvicks

narrated by Evan Jarvicks

For a one-man band, Brad Fielder sure refuses to be a one-note artist. His ever-refining take on roots music leads him to odd corners of resourceful creativity. From recording in mono to busking without electricity, he has experimented for years to whittle away every crutch of modern production and to test every angle of presentation. If the song stays true and takes flight despite strange musical climates — and one of these, arguably, is Fielder’s unconventional vocal style — then his art proves resilient. Durability, after all, is one of the superpowers of great music. 

His last album, Way Highly, was a fuzzy one-man band 8-song quickie recorded live in “the shop,” as his single-sentenced liner note half explains. It was given the vinyl treatment, though, and that shows that even Fielder’s most off-the-cuff work is never slight. There is intent behind all of it. 

It is such a treat, then, when he takes his experimental findings into the studio proper and allows himself the space for band arrangements and a recording budget, all baseline requirements for most recording artists but spare indulgences for a lo-fi man like Fielder. 

He has a new studio album on the way called Demons+Rationals, presumably a devilish play on a nominalized adjective, “demonstrationals.” Its first lead single, “Little Lake Turnaround”, releases today with a fun music video, and you can watch it here in this Make Oklahoma Weirder premiere.

Like the original blues music that inspired it, the innocuously titled “Little Lake Turnaround” is a muddy, blustery number that emotes through rhythmic stomp and wailing guitar solo. Recounting roadside oddities and fever dream nonsequiturs, it follows a less conventional narrative than the sort found on Fielder’s last major studio record, 2021’s Welcome to New Hoyle. His conversational storytelling amplifies here into the kind of rumbling ramble that one might associate with a loose grasp on reality, yet his performance conveys an air of conviction.

If Fielder’s wild-eyed mugging to the camera in the (unfortunately slightly out of sync but mostly well-shot) music video is any clue, he is showing a glimpse of his inner cigar-chomping madman to deliver his assembly of fragmented vignettes. It isn’t all performative, as there is also plenty of grounded music performance here conveyed through shots of guitar playing. Whether in a blank room or outdoors on the back of a truck with the current incarnation of his solo rig, no amount of character acting and gimmickry undermines the foundation of his work. For a video that sees a man grabbing a cold hot dog on a slice of bread from the bottom of a rusty pail and casually shoving it in his mouth at a fishing hole, that’s really saying something. 

Although he appears as a solo act in the music video, Brad Fielder assembled a band for this recording. It features Norman musicians Charley Reeves on sousaphone and Juel Niimi on trombone as well as New Orleans artists Brandon Brunious on electric guitar, Megan Harris Brunious on accordion, and Jesse Armerding on percussion. For “Little Lake Turnaround”, Fielder returned to Bigtone Records, a fully analog vintage recording studio in Louisiana where much of the equipment is over American retirement age. This is where he laid down New Hoyle and presumably where the rest of Demons+Rationals will come from. It speaks volumes that when Fielder goes big, he sticks to his analog guns and insists on working with salt-of-the-earth folks who value earnestness over glamour. “Little Lake Turnaround” could go hi-fi stereo with crisp studio session performances as 2018’s Country Folk did, but it doesn’t. 

The last time Make Oklahoma Weirder premiered a Brad Fielder music video back in 2019, he wore plain church clothes attire in a modest living room. Now, he’s outdoors with blue jeans, a cigar, and an unkempt head of hair, letting loose lyrical asides like “people lookin’ at him and sayin’ this motherfucker might be crazy.” It’s rare for Fielder to drop an f-bomb like that, but that’s only because he has often been one to tell the story. On “Little Lake Turnaround”, however, he embodies the main character.

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aka Jarvix, the Chief Executive Weirdo of Make Oklahoma Weirder. His out-of-the-box music coverage has been published by the Oklahoma Gazette, KOSU, and The Oklahoman among others. He also makes DIY music as a solo multi-instrumentalist live looper in his spare time.

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