Overview: With Factionation, I wanted to create something simple and dreamlike. We shot it at the tail end of the covid pandemic when, fresh from the weirdness of extended isolation, being back in the ‘real world’ felt like a dream in itself. Coupled with the song’s themes of division and unity – issues the pandemic seemed to explode in prevalence – and viewing the song through that lens felt almost unavoidable. This thinking informed aspects like the distanced staging, and isolating the artists from each other via screens or artificial projection. And then, in the middle of it all, we have Russ, the naïve country bumpkin, emblematic of a wide-eyed hope that we might still find common ground.