Coyote Song

role: director, producer

Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes fame, wrote the country-tinged ballad, Coyote Song, in 2010 as a protest to Arizona’s controversial law that gave police broader power to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally. The song was Conor’s contribution to the Sound Strike, a coalition of artists who were boycotting Arizona at the time. All proceeds from Coyote Song went to the Florence Project, an organization providing free legal help to immigrants caught detained in Arizona.

We shot the music video for Coyote Song in El Paso, Texas, over three days at Sonic Ranch, a three-generation almond farm turned music recording studio whose property goes right up to the US-Mexico border. It’s also happens to be where the George W. Bush administration stopped building the border fence because it ran out of funding. So in the dead heat of summer, with the Border Patrol whizzing by and narcos monitoring us from the other side of the Rio Grande, we propped up an old piano in front of the tall, rusty fence and rolled the camera.