The Verve Pipe: Happiness Is

Director, J.P. Riley was still in college at Northwestern University majoring in Radio/Television/Film and Percussion Performance. He met The Verve Pipe on New Year's Eve, 2000 at The House of Blues in Chicago, where The Verve Pipe was opening for Train. J.P. was working as a College Marketing Rep for Sony Music Entertainment and was tasked with getting Train's single, Drop's of Jupiter added into rotation at College Radio. The Verve Pipe were performing a few new tracks from their upcoming album, "Underneath" and Riley thought the new tracks were amongst the best he'd heard in recent years. His co-worker, Ryan Sudick's best friend, Monica was in Promotions at RCA and invited the guys over to Keyboardist to Doug Corella's New Years Party, where Doug and J.P. struck up a conversation and became fast friend's, one of the band's managers, Mac Ward, recognized J.P. from his previous job at Wilco (where JP had been a production intern in the spring of 1999 for recently departed band member, Jay Bennett). J.P. informed Doug that the worst part about his departure from Wilco was that he was using their recording equipment, with Jay and Jonathan Parker engineering on nights and weekend's at The Wilco Loft...which was unfortunate because they weren't done tracking the music for a short film he was in the middle of shooting at Northwestern...which was essentially a reverse-engineered music video. As opposed to writing a music video treatment to compliment a song, Riley was writing a song to accompany a narrative music video. Doug Corella asked to hear the rough mixes of just Guitar and Drums tracks and see some of the footage. JP actually had his laptop in the trunk of his Honda outside, upon hearing and seeing what he had captured, Doug offered his home studio to finish the track and following spring, JP's short film, "Horizon" would win The Audience Award at The Chicago Underground FIlm Festival, A Special Jury Prize at SXSW and Columbia's Flicker Fest. When the band's manager asked what he was going to do next after accepting an award at AFI Fest, JP replied...get outta $18,000 of credit card debt. The band said they were looking for a music video director for three of the singles on Underneath and asked him to write three treatments for each track. The following week, he faxed a treatment for The single Happiness Is to DBMI Management and RCA. three hectic months later, on Oct 2nd, JP became production on the music video for for their single "Happiness Is".