Corinne Sharlet Combs Spaghetti-Western Style With “Deceiver” Video

The beauty of songwriting is it strikes when you least expect it. And sometimes, you have to go looking for it. Out of Portland, Oregon, indie folk singer-songwriter Corinne Sharlet sought to creatively reinvent herself and picked up the guitar after a lengthy hiatus. Lo and behold, her new song, “Deceiver,” paired with a sultry, sun-bathed video, premiering today on American Songwriter, revealed itself.

“Old friend deceiver / Make me a believer,” she beckons through a country and western dust cloud. “Dangerous wonder / I’ll gladly go under.”

She fully immerses herself, and eventually the listener, too, in dark emotional waves of storytelling. Once she allows herself to fall, as one does into a deep slumber, she arrives on a song that is ethereal and stormy. “Stay a while with me / Drink to uncertainty,” she hypnotizes with her angelic, songbird voice. “We’ll sing a sweet melody / Cross the ocean of dreams.”

With a video directed by Evan James Benally Atwood, “Deceiver” ebbs and flows, dangerously tingling the senses. Sharlet dangles the melody across a vast countryside, the dust of the earth crunching beneath her Corvette red cowgirl boots, and her knack of spaghetti-western style is irresistible. “[This] was the first song I wrote on guitar after years of not writing, so the song itself became a call to my own creativity and imagination,” she says.

“Wandering through the woods behind my neighborhood in Central Oregon became a powerful source of creativity and imagination for me and inspired me to write my own songs. I think one of the main reasons I write songs is to reconnect with that spellbinding feeling I experienced as a kid, like I’m a part of something bigger than myself,” she explains. “I wanted to try and capture that mysterious feeling visually in the video by using different landscapes so luckily we were able to actually shoot part of the video in the same area I grew up in that continues to be a source of creative inspiration for me. “

“Deceiver” serves as the title cut to Sharlet’s debut EP.

Watch the “Deceiver” video below.

Photo Credit: Evan James Atwood