Chris Stapleton's Epic New Music Video Is an All-Lego Extravaganza

Pure Imagination Studios brings singer's idea to life

Woody Guthrie's guitar killed fascists, but Chris Stapleton's slays dragons.

At least, it does in the fantastical Lego world of his new music video, for "Second One to Know." The 41-year-old country star had an idea for a Lego music video a few years ago—and approached the Danish toy maker, which enlisted Pure Imagination Studios producer/director David Coleman to make it happen. 

Check out the 3:34 video here:

That's some face-melting, lizard-petrifying guitar work. And was that ... Chris Pratt playing Stapleton's No. 1 fan? (Yes, yes it was.)

"Second One to Know" came out back in 2017, but Stapleton tells Rolling Stone it was worth the wait to get the video together. 

"We had a lot of fun doing it, but it took maybe two years to get through all the approvals, and then a whole year on top to work on it," he says. "So it's been a long road, but in the end I think it's something really unique. Certainly there's never been an officially licensed Lego [music] video before, and that's kinda fun." (There have been lots of unofficial ones, of course.) 

Stapleton played with Legos as a kid, and so do his kids now. 

"I was trying to dream up a video for this song," he says. "This song always sounded like a fight scene to me, and I was like 'Well, what could we do?' I went through some iterations in my brain, like 'Do we hire Steven Seagal or something like that?' I'm not sure if one of the Lego Movies was out at the time or what, but I always like to swing for the fences idea-wise and was like, 'Well, what if we just call the Lego people and see if they would make us into Legos?' Then it turned into something crazy." 

Getting Lego approvals for everything that appears in the video was the biggest challenge, he adds. 

"Every boat or figure or outfit or hair color, anything that's in the video required an approval—and a discussion and revisions, editing—everything down to the tambourine and getting the right drum kit," Stapleton says. "We had to get approvals from Lego to make guitars that were the shape of the guitar I play, because there were some things they already had in the Lego databank, so to speak, but some things we had to create." 

The painstaking work paid off. The results are on par creatively with the Lego movies themselves, as well as Lego's co-branded efforts, including the Turkish Airlines safety video, which also took three years to make. 

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Tim Nudd
Tim Nudd was editor in chief of the Clio Awards and editor of Muse by Clio from 2018 to 2023.

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