Trent Atkinson and Brandon Stansell | Hometown / 2018 [music video]

out of control

by Douglas Messerli

 

MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) Hometown / 2018 [5 minutes] [music video]

 

In the first few minutes of Brandson Stansell’s music video Hometown, the singer confronts a mother packing up for her son, obviously sending him out of their home for being queer. “You brought it on yourself son.” “I didn’t have a choice, ma.” “I don’t believe that,” she summarizes, the common refusal of parents to comprehend that being gay is not a decision that one makes, but that it is made for you by your natural desires. And in fact, it carries with it a force of feelings that most young men attempt to deny, divert, alter at first before finally accepting what they gradually know is inevitable: to admit to themselves and their family that they are attracted to other boys, not to the opposite sex.

     Although Stansell is full-grown in this rendition of the event, we understand it to be a scene he experienced as a young man coming out to his conservative gay family nearly a decade earlier than this song’s release in 2018.

     Beginning as a backup dancer for Taylor Swift, Stansell quickly rose in the Country and Western charts after the release of his albums Dear John (2015), Slow Down (2016), For You (July 2018), and now Hometown. Stansell has quickly risen on the queer Country/Western charts to stand along side such notables as Steve Grand, Chris Housman, Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, and Cameron Hawthorn.

     Since he has shamed the family through his admission, as his mother puts: “You need to go.”

     We see the singer walking down a wet street, bag in hand, leaving home before he starts up his real tearjerker which begins years later as he seems to be contemplating just what his hometown, the place he was forced to leave, actually meant to him:

 

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you

With your one red light and Baptist steeple

The people hear are hard to face

The memories harder to erase.”

 

     But instead of feeling bitter and angry, the chorus of this ballad is almost a contradictory statement of forgiveness and, even more importantly, recognition that this town is what has made him who he is.

 

“But I can’t change it

That’s OK cause

I’ve learned to let it go

It’s out of my control

It might sound crazy

I should say thank you

Cause now I finally know

Who I really am

And I’m made from my hometown.”

    That last line sounds almost like a strident march, a declaration of pride, despite, as he continues, how hard to is to talk to his father and “My mom I don’t know anymore,” and the fact that “all the late-night talks turn to fight wars.” He’s been able to lay it all aside and still declare his love of town and family.

     In an interview with the Huffington Post with Curtis M. Wong, Stansell reiterates the position in takes in this song:

 

“People in the country sphere and in the South are more open than we give them credit for. …My hope is that [LGBTQ] people ― especially country music lovers who are living in the South ― will see this and realize they’re not as alone as they might feel at times and that people who have LGBTQ brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends realize that when those people decide to share their truths, that it’s not an easy moment. It’s an important moment, and it should be treated that way.”

    Wanting to film nearer to his Georgetown, Tennessee home, his director Travis Atkinson and he decided to on Nashville, although instead of following a narrative of small town stores and steeples, Atkinson has chosen, after the initial dramatic dialogue between mother (played by Janet Ivey) and son, to show only one long camera run down a street of lower middle class housing before focusing on the singer himself. There are only brief moments of past memories, observed primarily through windows, from the backs of individuals and odd angles, all of which reassert the outsiderness of Stansell even as an adult, with occasional nods from figures in his past who treat him almost as a passing stranger. As Stansell admits, “his relationships with many of family members remain strained.”

    As Wong’s piece underscores:

 

“It was like having a therapy session on film,” he said. “I was having to relive a lot of things that I’d blocked out.” Turns out, those on-camera tears were legit. By the time shooting wrapped, he said, “My camera crew was crying, my director was crying, and I was crying, so I was like, ‘OK, I think we got it!’”

 

     For all the tears it might still arouse, however, the anthem-like strains of this song remove almost all sentimental aspects of the narrative, as the singer/composer asserts his continued commitment to his roots.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).