Hell Paso is HERE.
Koe Wetzel’s fifth studio album is out everywhere as of today, and if you haven’t already, you’re gonna want stop reading this now and go turn it up.
In addition to dropping the record, he released a music video for a new tune on the 13-song tracklist called “Money Spent.”
In my very humble opinion, Koe puts out some of the best music videos in the business, and they’re always very well done and have a specific story and theme.
But this one is actually a little bit different, where we go back and forth between shots of Koe out on the road performing at shows, after it starts with him lighting a check on fire with a heart written on it, which is a really cool shot from a video perspective.
The song is very clearly about a breakup, which he told Consequence was inspired by the memory of a former flame and finding a box of her stuff in his garage when he was unpacking after he bought a house last year:
“I bought a house a year ago and had to unpack everything in my garage.
One of those boxes had all of my ex-girlfriend’s shit in it. It was raining outside. I was in one of those moods where I was like, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to sit on the couch and grab a guitar.’
You’re over it, but you’re not really over it.”
He added that, with the help of a couple other writers, he was able to finish the song and make it exactly what he wanted it to be while recording Hell Paso at the Sonic Ranch near El Paso, Texas:
“At the time I felt like I had writer’s block, but I had written a couple of things with Andrew Baylis and Michael Whitworth.
So while I was in El Paso cutting the album, they sent me the ‘Money Spent’ chorus and hook. After I heard that, the rest of it just kinda came to me and we knocked it out in a couple of hours.”
The contrast between the close-ups of him burning the check and his wild life out on the road is quite stark, as he sings about being able to move on to bigger and better things without her, no matter how much time, effort, and money he spent maintaining the relationship.
He knows that, at the end of the day, it’s best for him to push forward without her in his life:
“I hate it hurts to think of you
Way back way back when you loved me
Well I got better things to do
Than backtrack way back when you loved me”
He summed up the mission he has with all of his music quite simply, though, and I think he puts it best:
“The video for ‘Money Spent’ was put together from a bunch of clips of us on the road and it turned out cool.
We aren’t trying to reinvent anything… just want to make music we think is cool and we think it’s cool that so many people seem to think it’s cool back.”
And spoiler alert, but Hell Paso is really freaking cool… make sure you check out the whole album and start right here with “Money Spent”:
It’s actually the third video for a song from this new record, as he previously played zombie slayer in the video for “Creeps,” and depicted how he might spend his last day on earth in “April Showers.”
“Creeps”
“April Showers”
