Folk Alley premiered the latest video from The Stray Birds, featuring their Best Medicine track “Never For Nothing.” The video follows a wayward musician, finding purpose while playing crowded subway tunnels and house shows.

Maya from The Stray Birds shared the inspiration for the song on the band’s Facebook.

Several years ago, in Paris, a policeman told me I needed to leave the underground metro because I didn’t have a permit to play music there. As I began to pack up my fiddle, he spun around and added, “but I sounds really nice, and I wish you could stay.” I climbed up the steps to the daylight, found a street corner, and opened up my case, and kept on playing.

Five years passed, and I was boarding a night train in Greenville, SC with The Stray Birds. We had abandoned our broken down touring van, and were headed to New York City on a 15-hour train ride, with armfuls of instruments and suitcases. We had a show to play the next day, and we had an important date with a musician and a videographer to make an illustration of a song called “Never For Nothing”.

Canadian musician Taylor Ashton stepped into my voice, and the shoes of a busker and a traveler are shoes he knows well. Filmed and edited by Jacob Blumberg, “Never For Nothing” is an homage to music as an offering—on a back porch, singing for nobody but the birds—on a subway platform, tossed as a rope for anyone to hold—around a campfire, shared between friends and the stars.

Watch “Never For Nothing” over on Folk Alley.

Best Medicine is available now.