Kevin Sanders directed a video of The Lilacs hit “Shadow of Doubt” from The Lilacs Endure. The band scored a coup when the dean of Canadian music journalists, the great Darryl Sterdan, asked to exclusively premiere it on his well-read site Tinnitist. The Lilacs have always had a strong Canadian fan base and performed over 20 shows up north over the years.
We shot most of the video in Chicago, with a few additional shots in New Jersey and New York. We used locations that have had resonance for The Lilacs throughout our history: Phyllis’ Musical Inn on Division St, the University of Chicago, including the exact same spots where we’d filmed some shots for the Hop In the Stanza video 27 years earlier, a couple different el stops, Wicker Park. The shot above, taken at Phyllis’ Musical Inn on Oct. 19, 2019 by Dan M. Parker, features the band playing at a place that seems sealed in amber. Even as Division St. has changed to the point of being unrecognizable, the bar itself looks and feels — and sounds — exactly as it did in 1991.
This song has such a bluesy, Stonesy feel, and Sanders said he “just wanted to show the band being a band — the sheer joy of playing music together.” The Shadow video quickly eclipsed 10,000 views and continues to grow.