Brian Carpenter & the Confessions‘ debut album The Far End of the World, was released last month. On the new record, Carpenter (The Swans, Beat Circus, Ghost Train Orchestra) drew in a range of players the Boston music scene, including  drummer Gavin McCarthy (Karate, Ted Leo), guitarist Andrew Stern (Beat Circus), violinist Jonathan LaMaster (Cul de Sac), violist David Michael Curry (Thalia Zedek Band), cellist Rachel Barringer (The Wrong Shapes), and singers Jen Kenneally and Noell Dorsey (Guillermo Sexo). Craig Schumacher (Calexico, Neko Case) mixed the album, which contains a number of rich, often haunting arrangements..

Today we premiere the video for “This Lonely Road” from the new record. As Carpenter explains, the song benefits from serendipity involving the jewelry of guest Carla Kihlstedt: “I wrote this song while spending a lot of time in New York City. The song means something much different to me now than it did then. The key to unlocking the thing ends up being the necklace, which strangely enough began as an accident. During the recording of This Lonely Road, Carla Kihlstedt had brought in this gargantuan string instrument called the nyckelharpa. It’s a traditional Swedish instrument…gorgeous sounding but very unwieldy thing. And right when we started rolling, the necklace she was wearing accidentally got caught in the strings and made this interesting sound. Carla and I both liked it so we kept it in…that’s the sound you hear at the very beginning and throughout the song…she continued playing it like a percussion device. A couple years later working on the video, the director Joshua Black Wilkins had built up this nonlinear story with flashbacks and so forth. And we decided to take the necklace one step further to suggest a narrative. So you always want to leave yourself open to accidents…you never know where they might lead.”