WATCH: "Alive" from "REACH ME" Movie!

“ALIVE” is SIX YEARS in the making and you may not have ever heard it, if not for an interesting chain of events. “Alive” was written with Jamie Hartman and Philip Bentley in 2012 on my very first song writing trip to Los Angeles immediately after a brush with death on the 405 Freeway. I was stuck in traffic in my rental car on the California Freeway when I heard breaks screeching behind me. I looked in the rearview and saw a car barreling down upon me, I was a goner for sure. At the last moment the brakeless vehicle cut its wheel and only barely scratches my bumper, but the other car careens into the concrete wall, sliding and smashing up against it. I pulled my rental car over to help the kid in the other car and assess the damage on my rental. The kid and the rental car were mostly fine, but as we waited for the police, tragedy struck in the HOV lane on the 405 directly in front us. Another car with no brakes, but this time the driver didn’t swerve. The car in my position was crushed on both sides and the man driving the car was badly hurt, I'm not even sure that he survived. My life flashed before my eyes, it could have been me leaving in the ambulance. I got to my session quite a bit late and quite a bit shaken up, but wondered if maybe we should use my weird energy to try and write a song. We finished “Alive” in a couple hours and I laid down a scratch vocal for the song demo. At the time, I decided that the song wasn’t the direction I wanted to head in musically and that was the last I thought about the song again, until 2014. Two years after writing the song I get a phone call from “Alive" co-writer/producer Jamie Hartman who tells me the song is going to be used in a Hollywood movie starring Sylvester Stallone and others called “Reach Me". I'm dumbfounded, how? Turns out Hartman liked the song so much that he added it to his song writing reel and when director John Herzfeld and his wife Rebekah Chaney were listening to the 60 plus track Jamie Hartman song writing sample CD they keyed into the very real vibe behind the lyrics and vocal of “Alive”. I literally never had a chance to learn the song and sing it rehearsed, the vocal I recorded as scratch hours after my near death experience was already cut into the movie and...everyone seemed to love it! At first “Alive” was only meant as a song for the end credits of the film, which was a major honor in itself, but then when Sylvester Stallone saw an early cut of the movie, the song jumped out at him as well and he suggested the song be used in promoting the film on TV and so they did that too, adding “Alive” into the theatrical trailer for the movie! AND THEN on top of everything else they decided to shoot a music video! I was over the moon. I’d all but forgotten about the song and it came back to me all on it’s own with a movie in tow, like a good dog or something. An early cut of the video featured me in a big way. So much so that when I saw it, I felt a little embarrassed, not really having had anything to do with the film until a month earlier it seemed weird for me to all of a sudden be the focus of everything. So, I asked my now friend director John Herzfeld to CUT ME OUT of the video. This is one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in my life. I immediately regretted it. The video ended up as a clip show of the film, with a little bit of me thrown in here and there, which was fine, but the original cut was an awesome Jesse Blaze Snider music video that now no one would get to see! Or would they? Flash forward to 2016 and now John Herzfeld was directing the music video for “Promised Land”, due out 9/16/16 alongside my digital album, "16". Eventually, I finally got the chance to express my regrets over the “Alive” music video. So, John decided to track down the original cut and give it to all of you to see! Please enjoy, the original cut of my video for “Alive”, directed by John Herzfeld….