This is one my favorite songs from Jesse’s most recent album “Feel.” It was not until I heard Jesse talking about the song during an interview that I realized it was about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We asked him to tell us about the video and here’s what he had to say:

I met Naama at Palacinka Cafe in Soho, where she was a waitress. It used to be my neighborhood cafe before closing just this past January. One day she told me that she was a film student at the New School and wanted to make a video of my song “How Could It Take So Long?” Why not? When we met to discuss her idea, she said she had been seeking old Super 8 films online that she would use to cut back and forth between them and me, in the present. My father had recently passed away and it so happened that I had just re-discovered a trove of a Super 8’s which he made and labeled meticulously from 1969-1980. When I told this to Naama, her eyes nearly popped out and she said, “I have to have them!” She transferred all of the films to digital, taking up 6 DVDs worth of space, and picked out the footage. In the end, the video may not have much to do with my original idea of the lyrics, which I wrote from the point of view of someone stuck inside the Super Dome in New Orleans after Katrina, but somehow it captures the feeling of the song and suggests a meaning that perhaps I did not even intend; besides, what inspires a song is often not what it ends up being about. It’s an understatement, I’m sure, to say that my father would be pleased to know that these films are being used and that, in some way, however small, he has made his mark as a filmmaker. – Jesse Harris