TORONTO (CP) - In an eerie coincidence, Canadian country trio the Wilkinsons are set to film a music video Wednesday that depicts a deadly school shooting. Songwriter Steve Wilkinson says the timing of the video shoot - two days after Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. - is an unfortunate circumstance he never saw coming but has nothing to do with capitalizing on the blanket media coverage of the tragedy.
Wilkinson admits he momentarily considered delaying the video for "Nobody Died" and postponing the single's May 1 release date, but quickly dismissed that notion, believing attention must be drawn to youth violence. "Now, even more, that light needs to be shone on this issue," Wilkinson said Tuesday by phone from his home just north of Belleville, Ont. "I know that there's going to be some people out there who go, 'Oh, yeah, you just put this out and it's gratuitous.
' It's not." "This isn't something where we went, 'Oh, OK, let's go with this. This is topical, it'll make people sit up and take notice.
' That's not what happened here. It's a terrible, terrible incident. I would just as soon that we came out with this and that tragedy had never occurred.
" Wilkinson, a father of three, says he wrote "Nobody Died" about five years ago as a cautionary tale to any troubled youth considering violence as a way to cope. In the song, he reminisces about his own days in school, when "kids smoked and swore and broke some rules but ..
. Nobody died/We all made it home." The video's storyline focuses on a troubled boy harassed by bullies and a popular young girl (played by Wilkinson's youngest child, Kiaya, 17) who tries to reach out to him.
It ends in gunfire in a high school classroom, with a student dead. Wilkinson says the song was partly inspired by the carnage at Colorado's Columbine high school in 1999. He says the band initially "lacked the courage" to release the song, but subsequent school tragedies have changed their minds.
"I listen to radio all the time, trust me, and I'm baffled by the mediocrity that I hear and I just figured, you know what? This needs to be out, it needs to be heard by somebody, anybody," Wilkinson says. "They have a plethora of reasons not to play it, but I think if people hear it, it'll touch something in their hearts and .
.. if there's a collective consciousness of a nation or a people or society maybe we can touch that nerve, then somehow you'll make a difference.
" Director Warren Sonoda says the video crew were in pre-production when they heard news of the latest school attack. He insists the sensitive subject matter will be handled with care. "I think our intention is good, I think our intention is true," Sonodo says from Toronto.
"It's rare when you make music videos to be able to do videos that really matter in some sort of social way. It kind of makes you realize that you have the ability to say something important, and I'm hoping we can do that with this video." The plan is to push ahead with the Toronto shoot and deliver it to Country Music Television as soon as possible, likely before the end of the month, says CMT programmer Casey Clarke.
Clarke says the single will also find airtime on CMT's companion radio station, the New Country 95.3 in Toronto, calling it a good song despite the unfortunate timing. The country band - made up of Wilkinson, his daughter Amanda and son Tyler - is currently promoting its fifth disc, "Home," released last month, and the second season of their television show "The Wilkinsons," also on CMT.
The disc is not scheduled for release in the United States, but Wilkinson says he's looking at distribution deals. Media watcher Bob Thompson says artists should take care in the way they approach such sensitive issues, but shouldn't shy away from tackling them head-on. "If we live in a world where this kind of stuff is happening, we not only should allow our poets, our songwriters, our novelists, our moviemakers to deal with this subject, it shouldn't be off-limits, we should expect them to," says Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University in upper New York state.
"These are profound experiences in a culture, these are really kind of extreme expressions and they can carry all sorts of metaphoric meaning, so we should expect our (artists) to do that.
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