Asheville-based singer-songwriter Christopher Paul Stelling just released his first new music in two years. And while listeners still have to wait a while for an album, the Ben Harper-produced single, “Have To Do For Now,” is matched by a lush, Asheville-set video.
“Mid-September, still too hot, tomatoes grow in an old tin pot, while across the street an empty lot, that will have to do for now,” Stelling sings in the the seasonally appropriate track. But despite the ambling tune and folky, repeated refrain of acceptance on keeping on, the video suggests something darker. Directed and shot by Andrew Anderson (with Scott McKibben and Ethan Payne), the film features Stelling’s wife, actor Julia Christgau.
As “Have To Do For Now” unspools a kind of to-do list of the day-to-day that sometimes falls short of expectations, the accompanying imagery with its farmhouse locale, vintage furniture and piles of old books, conjures the idealized past that so many of us long to return to — or at least live in for a late-summer month. The well-paired aesthetic of songwriting and video suggests Stelling’s forthcoming album will be worth the wait.
