Leslie Stevens Music Video
Johnny Lavallee
Jon Hamm has a new role: He plays an emotionally unavailable boyfriend in singer Leslie Stevens‘ new music video for “Blue Roses.”
The clip, released Friday, features Hamm in a cowboy hat and denim shirt, as he hands Stevens blue roses and she sings the lyrics, “Go ahead and take another little piece of my heart/I’ll give it to you as a fall apart.” The bluesy rock-pop track features the hook, “All I get from you are blue roses.”
The Emmy-winning actor even hijacks Stevens’ microphone during her live performance and replaces it with blue roses in the video, directed by Paige Stark of the rock band Tashaki Miyaki.
“I love a music video, and when it’s for a good song it’s even better” says Hamm, whose other music video credits include EELS’ “Are We Alright Again,” Aimee Mann’s “Labrador,” The Lonely Island and Rihanna’s “Shy Ronnie 2: Ronnie & Clyde” and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” the latter of which released in 2021, 51 years after the song came out.
“I’ve been a fan of her music for a long time,” Hamm says of Stevens, whose sound is a mix of Americana, folk, country, rock and singer-songwriter styles. “I’ve followed along with her incredible career so far. She’s a very talented person and always has been.”
Stevens says Hamm — who taught acting at her high school in St. Louis — came up when she began thinking of the “dream actor to play this toxic cowboy” in her music video.
“Working with Jon was an honor. He’s as charismatic as he is kind, and he just seems to be able to create and add so much dimension to his character on the spot. So that on-set magic was really present and by the end of the day I could feel that I had just been smiling all day long,” Stevens says. “He’s so talented and we were so lucky to have him be a part of it.”
Along with Friday’s announcement of the new music video, Stevens also dropped the release date — Feb. 23 — for her new self-titled album, which features “Blue Roses.” She also released a new song from the album called “Big Time Sucka.” Leslie Stevens is the singer’s third solo album after releasing projects with the ensemble Leslie and the Badgers.
“I think the meaning behind the new album is that there is so much good that one can make out of the bad. It’s like the metaphorical flowers that grow out of the fertilizer. Bad things happen, it’s not optional, but there can be a dignity to it even if it’s just that it leads one to appreciate the good,” Stevens says. “I wanted to have as much fun as I possibly could recording the songs and have lots of gorgeous pieces and parts and express myself.”
Stevens produced the album with Kevin Ratterman, who has worked with My Morning Jacket and Ray LaMontagne. My Morning Jacket’s Bo Koster and Incubus’ Nicole Row appear on the album, and Stevens says the project is self-titled because it “felt so much like me.”
“I like to say my mom named the record. I had been inside alone with a small child during the 2020 lockdown, followed by an entire year of homeschool and isolation, so when I went to make this recording I wanted to make something that really expressed something giant and fun, not only in spite of, but because of the rough times,” she says. “Writing music helps me process the challenges and turn them into something more.”