Just a few short weeks after the announcement came recognizing the Cave City Watermelon Festival as the recipient of an international award for the catchy parody song “I’m from Cave City”, the singer and performer of the song, Garrett Duncan dropped a new EP which had been in the making for quite some time.
“It was an honor to be part [of the song for the festival]. I had gotten a call from Crystal Crow and she said she wanted me to do it. Adam Davis filmed it. It was great exposure,” Duncan said. Fast forwarding Duncan has a new partner in his endeavors with Videographer Jared Soucie who has helped the visual for Duncan’s new album “The Darkened” come to life.
“It’s a six song EP called The Darkened and it is my first concept album. I met Jared at a Halloween party and we got to talking about music and film. He’s a film junkie and has done a really good job,” Duncan said.
When asked about the new album, Duncan said he had gone through a period where he was struggling with his faith and a bout of depression during which he worked to produce the songs which make up the album.
“I kind of had a struggle with my faith in Jesus Christ and it put me in a dark place, and I started writing about it to cope with it. I called it the darkened because I thought it best represented the universe. It’s a world I built and traversed for a while, and it represents the darkest parts of me. It can exist in anybody but for me it was a struggle for faith,” Duncan said.
This is not the first time Duncan has drawn inspiration from his personal battles to produce music for his fans.
“When I was working on Bitter Sweet and Void, it just seemed like I went through about three years of just being moody,” Duncan joked. “I went through a long depression and took medication for a couple of those years. I wrote all three albums in that time period and am excited about this project.”
Originally, the album was slated to drop in November, however; in a surprise shift, Duncan opted to do an early release of both his album and the first and second videos in what will be a three-part series that will be wholly released at the celebration party Nov. 4.
“We have a three-part music video series and part one, The Darkened and part two, Fear is out on YouTube. The Darkened is the title track and the story line is representative and paints a mental picture of what I went through at the time,” Duncan said. “There is symbolism that relates to my struggle, and we wanted to represent that visually.”
When watching the videos in the proper order, the powerful combination of song and visual representation brings forth not only a strong emotional response, but reminders of faith in God and relatable struggles.
“I’m proud of anything I release. I’m content with this whole album, it means a lot to me because it helped me through those struggles and I felt God gave me this album so I could work on myself,” Duncan said.
When asked what the most challenging video has been thus far, Jared stated the most recently released video, Fear, which was released Oct. 13 posed the greatest challenge.
Duncan said he and his team wrote the script two weeks prior to filming and often make it a habit to pray before filming, but time constraints and excitement of making more progress on the filming led to a lack of prayer.
“It was the most challenging, but it is our favorite video. It seemed like everything that could go wrong did. We even got locked out of the building we were using,” Duncan said. “All three videos were filmed in Salem and kind of surround Old Main. It gave us access to film in familiar locations. The extras are also local.”
On Nov. 4, Duncan said an event open to the community and to the world wide web will be held beginning at 7 p.m. with performance by his and his wife Ashton followed by the reveal of the final video.
“My wife Ashton and I will start with live covers then we’ll do a Q&A and answer questions from the internet and the crowd. At the end of the event we’re going to do something we’re calling ‘The Darkened Experience’ and I‘m going to perform the album from front to back and perform some popular songs from the other albums and we’re going to have a light show and do it to video projection so we’re going to show the videos and I’m going to play to them at the same time. We’ve been wanting to do this for a while and wanted to celebrate this.”
Jared noted the celebration will not be the end of the project.
“There are all three videos and there were a couple deleted scenes and so what we’re doing is to put all three together with the deleted scenes and have an extended cut for next year. There is a lot of storytelling we didn’t get to do because of time,” Soucie said. “We’re going to combine all three videos into a shorter film and that’s exciting for us. We’ll add in the deleted scenes and possibly film more of what we wanted and then The Darkened Extended Cut will come out in 2023.”
To watch the first two videos in the series click the links below:
Lauren is a an award-winning journalist who decided after 10 years of newspaper experience to venture out. Hallmark Times was born.
