Joshua Hedley Goes on a Vision Quest in ‘Weird Thought Thinker’ Video
More than any other track on his debut album Mr. Jukebox, “Weird Thought Thinker” sums up the quirkiness of Joshua Hedley. The Nashville singer-songwriter and pristine-voiced crooner fully embraces the wandering vibe of the song in a new video. Filmed on the bus, backstage and in the clubs, the clip finds Hedley combating the loneliness of the road with his band and audience. But even then, it’s hard to keep the isolation at bay — as he discovers when begins a walk through the desert, complete with shimmering visions and hallucinations.
Hedley says it’s one of the oldest songs on Mr. Jukebox and wrote it while listening to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He quickly realized, however, that an early version of the melody was familiar.
“It was ‘Willie the Wandering Gypsy and Me.’ That happens all the time. I’ll write a song and I’ll be like, ‘Oh shit, the melody…,'” Hedley tells Rolling Stone Country. “I tried recording it a few times and it never really came out the way I wanted it to. And then I just came up with that da, da, da, and it changed. As soon as I came up with that little riff, it opened the door of what that song could be. The juxtaposition of the silly ass lyrics with the strings sounds a lot nicer than it reads. It just made it a little more weird.”
Hedley is in the midst of a seemingly never-ending world tour that takes him to the U.K. in September.