Harry Connick Jr. shot his new music video in CT
Harry Connick Jr.’s video for his graceful cover of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” released last week, was filmed at the Sterling Opera House in Derby. It shows a weary looking, lightly bearded Connick walking up to a piano on a dusty, empty theater stage. We also see him wandering the historic Sterling building, which hasn’t offered regular theater shows since the mid-1940s and has been largely desolate for the past half-century. The video features moody external shots of the building, which is rumored to be haunted and was investigated for the “Ghost Hunters” reality TV series in 2011.
The video was shot Feb. 1, in a photogenic snowstorm, and released Feb. 12. You can watch it on YouTube. Connick’s new album, “Alone With My Faith,” will be released March 1.
The singer was famously born and raised in New Orleans, but for the last couple of decades he’s had a home in New Canaan. In 2013, when he wrote “Love Wins” to honor Newtown shooting victim Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, he worked on the recording at Horizon Studios in West Haven.
Connick’s far from the first to use
Connecticut as a video backdrop. Here are a dozen other memorable music video appearances by the Nutmeg state.
Agnostic Front, “For My Family.” The song celebrates the New York hardcore scene, but the live footage was filmed at Toad’s Place in New Haven.
David Bowie, “Repetition ‘97.” The song is a remake of an early Bowie hit, not released until after his death. The video comes from a Hartford rehearsal for his “Earthling” tour, filmed by Tim Pope.
Emma Charles, “Connecticut.” The up-and-coming singer/songwriter grew up in Connecticut, and this plaintive tune is illustrated with home movies of her childhood. The song’s chorus is not exactly something you’d want to put on a bumper sticker for state tourism: “I live so fast that I forget there’s a way out of Connecticut.”
Javier Colon, “The Moon and More” The West Hartford celebrity and season one “The Voice” winner didn’t have to leave the earth to blast through outer space to shoot this spacy 2017 video about lunar travel. Scenes were filmed at the Connecticut Science Center, his alma mater The Hartt School at the University of Hartford, museums in New York and Washington D.C., and beside a “Living on Mars” mural in the Bronx.
Ariana Grande, “Monopoly.” When Grande played Mohegan Sun in late March 2019, she put the time she had before her concert that night to good use, finding a convenient rooftop and dancing about with Victoria Monét, the song’s co-writer, for a video released just two days later. The song went to #23 on the U.S. charts.
Goose, “Bingo Tour Movie.” Unable to tour last year, the Norwalk-based jam-band sensation livestreamed a series of concerts and other events in Fairfield County in June, then cut the footage into a feature-length film released in November.
The Hartford Whalers, “Whalermania.” The beloved hockey team rocks out to a cheesy rock song in a 1986-87 video yearbook TV special, which they’re likely embarrassed to find immortalized on YouTube.
Billy Joel, “River of Dreams.” Who knew he had a real river in mind, and not a metaphor? And that the river was the Connecticut River? Joel told the Courant’s Roger Catlin in 1993 that when the video was being planned, “some were suggesting the Hudson, but I said, ‘No, no no.’
The Connecticut River has much more in a shorter span, in terms of diversity. You have urban, and you have New England and you have bucolic and you have an
ocean.”
Amanda Palmer, “Polly.” The erstwhile Dresden Doll and Wesleyan grad recorded this cover of the Nirvana song for a “Nevermind” tribute organized for SPIN Magazine. Palmer’s band The Grand Theft Orchestra featured a couple of Yale School of Drama students. The song was recorded on Drama School sound equipment and the video was made in New Haven using student actors and a really cool old car.
Soul Asylum, “Misery.” The video for the first single off the faux-grunge act’s “Let Your Dim Light Shine” album (the disappointing follow-up to their breakthrough “Grave Dancers Union”) was filmed at Toad’s Place, where a live crowd paid just $5 to get in but had to endure multiple takes of the song before the band could indulge in a full set of other tunes. David Daley covered the filming for the Courant, writing “It was the first time in memory that Toad’s beefy bouncers didn’t eject crowd surfers” and “when the video comes on MTV, it’s a pretty fair guess that the wild crowd reactions will appear to be from ‘Misery,’ but were actually in response to older songs . ... It was that rare chance to watch a band that has sold millions botch lyrics, jump on each other’s solos, miss cues and start songs over.”
The Wiggles, “Wiggledancing! Live in the U.S.A.” The Australian kid-song superstars began as a pop band with some childhood-education students in it, and the full-length videos based on their live tours show how much fun they still have just playing music. “Wiggledancing!” was filmed at the Oakdale in Wallingford, where they’ve played on many of their international tours.
Neil Young, “Young Shakespeare.”
This just in: a rare live set Young played at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford in 1971 will get a proper video release at the end of March. It was shot in 16 mm by a German film crew and is known as the “Young Shakespeare” show. It’s the earliest known live footage of Young performing, and shows him singing “Heart of Gold” and other songs from “Harvest,” a year before that classic album was released.
Heart transplants may be particularly risky for young Black Americans, with new research suggesting they are twice as likely to die after they receive their new organ.
Researchers analyzed the outcomes of nearly 23,000 adults, ages 18 to 80, who had a heart transplant in the U.S. between 2005 and 2017. Compared with other heart transplant recipients, Black patients had an overall 30% higher risk of death after their transplant. But the risk of death was two times higher among Black patients ages 18 to 30 and 1.5 times higher among those ages 31 to 40.
Among the youngest
Black patients, the risk of death was greatest during the first year after transplant, with a nearly 2.3 times higher risk of death in this time period, according to the study recently published in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure.
“Our study is the first to highlight young Black recipients as a subgroup at a higher risk of death during the first year after a heart transplant,” said study first author Dr. Hasina Maredia, who led the project as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Previous research has shown that Black heart transplant patients have a higher risk of death, but this is the first study to find that younger Black transplant recipients have a higher risk of death in the first year after their operation.
Black patients have higher rates of heart disease at younger ages and may need heart transplants at younger ages, the researchers noted.
“The high risk associated with Black race is not specifically due to race itself; it is a marker of systemic racism and inequities that have resulted in significant health care disparities,” Maredia and study senior author
Dr. Errol Bush, surgical director of the Advanced Lung Disease and Lung Transplant Program at Hopkins, said in the release.