After co-directing an epic Dierks Bentley video, Ed Pryor could make CMA Awards history

In the music video for "Gone," a dejected Dierks Bentley is plopped on a motel bed with a beer and a remote control, clicking through channels.

It's a deceivingly lazy opening for one of the most elaborate and ambitious country music videos in recent memory. Bentley soon discovers that he's the star of every show on TV, from cop dramas and westerns to parodies of "The Office," "MacGyver" and "Game of Thrones," and all are recreated in the video with flash and precision.

"Gone" was a massive undertaking for Middle Tennessee native Ed Pryor and his co-directors Wes Edwards, Travis Nicholson, Running Bear and Sam Siske. And it hasn't gone unnoticed.

The clip is nominated for Music Video of the Year at Wednesday's CMA Awards. If it wins, Pryor will be the first Black director to win in the category's 32-year-history.

"I hope that it continues to just inspire people and young creatives that anything, really, is available," Pryor says. "There certainly is a stigma that Music Row does not cooperate with some of the other genres in the city and creators in the city. And I hope that my little bit of participation can show that it's possible."

The CMAs began giving awards to video directors in 1989, which coincidentally was the same year Pryor was born. He grew up in Winchester, Tenn. — roughly 90 miles south of Nashville — and is an alum of MTSU's Recording Industry department.

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He's also a musician and producer, and started making videos on an iPhone 4. That led to producing and directing country-rap parody videos for his hometown friends in the group Redneck Souljers. Several of their videos went viral, and caught the eye of Shannon Houchins, CEO of Average Joes Entertainment.

Pryor started working with the company and label group on a number of fronts, and within a few years, he was directing videos for their artists, including Colt Ford, Montgomery Gentry and Sister Hazel.

"They gave me a platform to show some creativity and collaborate with them pretty early," he says. At the same time, he was entering this space while being "the most unfamiliar," in his words, with the country world.

"I can say actively even participating in it. I'm still unfamiliar," he says. "I wasn't exposed to a lot of country music (growing up), But I'm a student of things, and I guess the easiest way I would explain it is that if you watch a horror film, there's an aesthetic, there's a particular type of direction. And that's the same thing I've learned quickly with country. I like to tell stories…I like to blur those lines of a flashy rap edit with a country storyline. I also kind of came from the school of ‘The music video is about the artist.’"

Those lines are blurred pretty brilliantly in "Gone," as Bentley is the star of a dozen highly stylized stories. Thanks to the pandemic, Pryor and his collaborators had full run of the recently completed Brooklyn Bowl Nashville complex. They built a motel room set on its stage, had Bentley diffuse a timebomb in the venue's kitchen and choregraphed a fight scene in the balcony.

But that's not all — when Bentley wasn't available for additional scenes parodying "Thrones" and "Friday the 13th," they used digital "Deepfake" technology to put his face on the body of a Bentley lookalike who works at his Whiskey Row Nashville honky tonk.

Pryor's quick to credit his numerous collaborators, many of whom are also fellow members of the collective Strange Arcade, which he describes as "like the Avengers meets the Justice League…an incubator for dope things."

Having the video's star be Bentley — "one of the best human beings I've worked with" — was a boon as well.

"That was an ambitious project, and we felt it would be better having the whole team be involved. As we started seeing what was feasible, we came into it with maybe 40 different setups, and obviously, that's not practical. But as we started to see the ones that we really wanted to do, and talking with (Bentley), he was all the way on board for that. I think he loved it."

Since "Gone," Pryor has directed videos for Cassadee Pope, Montgomery Gentry, Parmalee and Blanco Brown. You can see his work at edpryor.com

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Dierks Bentley video co-director Ed Pryor might make CMA Awards history