Watch Tucker Beathard Deal With a Breakup in ‘Rock On’ Video
At the start of the 2000s, it was still possible to go through a breakup and heal without seeing constant reminders of your pain across all forms of social media, but those days are a distant memory. And so Tucker Beathard’s video for “Rock On” opens with shot of the young singer-songwriter scrolling through his Instagram feed — past friends hanging on beaches, until he reaches the picture of the young woman he let slip away.
As the lyrics of this thumping rocker explain, she’s moved out west to start a new life without him. He’s mostly cool with it and wishes her well, except for the nagging regret that he should have put a “rock on” her finger. That mix of stoicism and vulnerability is part of what makes the song work, according to Beathard.
“I don’t plan on getting married anytime soon,” he tells Rolling Stone Country. “That song has an attitude to it, and it’s like, chill, do your thing…I don’t care. But the girls can like it too ’cause you admit, I should have put a rock on. It’s kind of funny.”
The Good One-directed video elaborates on this idea, leaving Beathard and his band to bash their way through the song while the young woman struggles to make ends meet and falls in with a guy who mistreats her (even violently in one scene). In the closing shot, she hears Beathard’s song on the radio and it becomes clear she has regrets of her own.
Beathard, the son of hit songwriter Casey Beathard and brother of Iowa Hawkeyes quarterback C.J. Beathard, will join Dierks Bentley’s Somewhere on a Beach tour on May 12th in Holmdel, New Jersey.