The pickup truck is the most loaded image in country music history. Country singers adopted it decades ago as a symbol of American pride and rural gumption, but over time it instead became a symbol of the genre’s insularity, one of the most overused, ham-fisted plays to country music’s base. It's significant, then, that the video for Field Report’s “Home (Leave The Lights On),” an uplifting highlight from the group’s forthcoming sophomore album Marigolden, plops singer Chris Porterfield in an old Ford F100. Generally speaking, Field Report’s base isn’t the kind of listenership moved by the sort of Pavlovian patriotic pride that the pickup trucks on CMT are meant to conjure, so instead in this lovely, watercolor-hued clip from Milwaukee’s Blackbox Visual, the truck serves as something far less romanticized: a mere form of transportation, not the destination itself. In fact, for as much as the song pines for home, in the video Porterfield never actually arrives there. At the end of his scenic travels he instead lands at a modest hotel that, even with the lights left on, is a poor substitute for the real thing.
You can stream the video below. Marigolden is out Oct. 7 on Partisan Records; the band has a Milwaukee show lined up for Wednesday, Oct. 22 at the Pabst Theater.
