I wrote a sincere thanks to Paul Speer on his Facebook page:
One of my favorite albums of all time. Thank you, Paul Speer! You and David Lanz did something very special here. The entire album is awesome!
Also, I have the Natural States VHS video that I absolutely loved, and was hoping for it to come out as a DVD. Paul Speer writes back regarding the quality of the video currently:
All were shot on 16mm film so they pale compared to hi def today. The first videos I uploaded were 11 years ago and youtube had restrictions on file size so the quality isn’t very good on those.
NS and DV were released on DVD but again, because of the source material, the quality isn’t so good. Unfortunately, we don’t know what happened to the original film or first transfer to video otherwise it would be possible to create a much better version in hi def.
Paul says everything was filmed in Washington state except for the second video, filmed on the California coast. I asked Paul how he and David created this masterpiece.
We’ve been interviewed many times about the project. The visuals were shot first by Jan C. Nickman and he did a rough cut of each piece that we started to compose to. Once we had the song structures, Jan would update the visuals so they were tighter with the music. After we finished recording, Jan did the final edits to blend seamlessly with the music. It was a time consuming back and forth process but well worth it, IMO. Of course, as we worked we had no idea if it would be a hit or a dud. We just did the best we could with what was available.
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This first video should cycle through the entire playlist automatically.
Otherwise, the rest of the videos are below this one.
