We Are Trees Take “Sunrise Sunset” to a Brooklyn Rooftop

A song above Brooklyn

On January 20, 2011, Yours Truly published a live performance of We Are Trees playing “Sunrise Sunset.” The session places the Virginia Beach project on a Brooklyn rooftop, where the modest setting and open air complement music built from acoustic movement, light percussion and carefully placed strings. The dated Yours Truly upload identifies the song and presents it as a live session; the following day, Nialler9 described the film as a High/Low production shot on a Brooklyn roof.

The location makes an immediate promise: this will not be a conventional stage performance. A roof has no curtain, lighting grid or clear border between performer and surroundings. That informality is especially apt for We Are Trees. The name sounds collective, but songwriter James Nee later explained that the project began as his solo outlet and gradually accumulated friends who could realize his arrangements. The rooftop session captures that balance. It is centered on one writer’s song, yet its character depends on musicians listening and responding to one another.

“Sunrise Sunset” was already the opening track on Boyfriend, the four-song debut EP whose artist-controlled Bandcamp edition lists a July 5, 2010 release. By the beginning of 2011, the record had started moving well beyond its Virginia Beach origin through blogs, direct streams and a small vinyl edition. The rooftop performance supplied something the EP alone could not: a compact visual explanation of how Nee’s layered pop could exist in real time.

The project behind the plural name

We Are Trees did not fit neatly into the usual distinction between solo act and band. In a February 2011 interview, Nee told Alternative Irish Music Review that he had started the project when he was young, then built a circle of musical friends around it. He composed and directed the music but rejected the idea that the supporting players were incidental. He specifically credited Josiah, Rocky and Pearl with helping him make Boyfriend.

That structure helps explain why contemporary descriptions varied. Writers could call We Are Trees a band, a project or a vehicle for Nee without necessarily contradicting one another. The songs carry the continuity of a single writer, while the arrangements invite other personalities into the frame. Violin, cello, guitar, percussion and stacked voices do more than decorate a singer-songwriter core; they determine how the music swells, recedes and changes color.

When Nialler9 introduced the act in September 2010, the site described Nee as a Virginia Beach bedroom-pop musician and heard a folk-dream-pop character in the acoustic-led arrangements. Turntable Kitchen’s December review emphasized the interaction of strings, shimmering guitar, percussion and harmonies. Those accounts differ in vocabulary, but both identify the same essential quality: We Are Trees made intimate music without making small-sounding music.

The rooftop clip is therefore more revealing than a simple promotional performance. It shows the plural logic of the name. Nee remains the focal point, but the song’s impact rests on the ensemble’s restraint—on parts entering without crowding one another and on rhythm providing momentum without turning the piece into straightforward rock.

Why “Sunrise Sunset” was the right introduction

As the first of Boyfriend’s four tracks, “Sunrise Sunset” already carried the responsibility of opening the listener’s path into We Are Trees. The official release sequence places it before “Daniel,” “Dear Chan Marshall” and “Final Round,” and its 4:44 duration gives the arrangement room to unfold rather than forcing an immediate hook. The Bandcamp page also tags the record as pop, acoustic, bedroom pop, folk, lo-fi and minimalist—a broad set of coordinates that reflects how difficult it was to reduce the project to one genre.

The session clarifies those labels by emphasizing the music’s physical components. Modern Mystery’s contemporary notice singled out the steady percussion, guitar and intermittent violin. Those elements are not remarkable merely because they appear together. Their importance lies in proportion. The drum pattern establishes forward motion, the guitar supplies harmonic shape, and the violin can register as a change in temperature rather than a constant wash.

That proportion also separates the song from the hazier end of lo-fi pop. The recording may feel close and unguarded, but its arrangement is deliberate. MAGNET’s February 2011 presentation heard delicate harmonies and trembling percussion in the group’s sound and noted that the video avoided distracting from the track. That is an accurate account of the session’s central achievement: it gives the viewer a setting to remember without turning the setting into the subject.

A more elaborate concept might have overwhelmed the song’s gradual development. Here, the roof supplies scale and atmosphere while the performance supplies the drama. The film trusts the musicians to hold attention through accumulation, dynamics and ensemble timing.

Five takes before the light disappeared

Nee’s later account provides unusually concrete production details. He said the session arose through a connection between his manager and a High/Low Films director who was visiting New York around CMJ. The musicians performed the entire song five times, working against the approaching sunset, and the drummer selected the rooftop. Nee also credited the group’s manager with recording the sound. Those details come from the February interview, in which the finished film remained fresh enough for the participants to describe its practical origins.

The five-take method matters. It indicates that the result was neither a casually captured rehearsal nor a heavily fragmented studio construction. Repeating a full song gives filmmakers options while preserving the arc of a performance: the players must still manage every transition, dynamic lift and pause from beginning to end. The deadline imposed by sunset added another limit. Natural light was not infinitely adjustable, and the musicians could not repeat the piece indefinitely.

That pressure quietly echoes the song’s title. The production was literally racing the transition named by “Sunrise Sunset,” but the connection need not be inflated into a grand concept. The location was chosen by a band member, and the team worked with the conditions it had. The elegance came from recognizing how those conditions could reinforce the music.

The original period embed was attributed to High/Low Film at Vimeo video 18799979, an attribution preserved by several contemporary articles. Turntable Kitchen further identified the performance as a High/Low recording made for Yours Truly. Together, the upload trail, independent coverage and Nee’s own recollection establish the film’s authorship and circumstances far more securely than an isolated image could.

A rooftop without mythology

Rooftop performances arrive with a long history in popular music, but this session does not need borrowed mythology to be effective. Its scale is closer to a field recording than a spectacular public event. The roof creates visual openness while maintaining emotional proximity: the city is present as environment, not as an audience to be conquered.

That distinction suits Nee’s songwriting. Contemporary writers repeatedly heard softness and intricacy in We Are Trees, but the project was not simply fragile. The percussion gives the songs a spine, and the strings can sharpen an emotional turn instead of smoothing it over. A rooftop exposes those relationships. With no conventional stage architecture to confer importance, every musical entrance has to justify itself.

The setting also makes the ensemble legible. On record, multiple parts can merge into one atmospheric surface. In a filmed performance, the viewer can connect sound to gesture and see that the arrangement is an exchange among players. That is particularly useful for a project whose membership was intentionally flexible. The clip does not resolve We Are Trees into a fixed lineup; it demonstrates how Nee’s compositions became collective acts when performed.

From a bedroom project to a wider circuit

The session appeared at a pivotal point in the project’s early circulation. Boyfriend had existed on Bandcamp since July 2010, Nialler9 had introduced We Are Trees in September, and Turntable Kitchen had named the EP among its discoveries by December. The January video then gave those listeners a portable live document—something that could be embedded, reposted and understood without a venue or tour arriving in every city.

This was an important route for independent music in 2011. A direct artist page established the catalog; specialist publications supplied description and recommendation; a session producer supplied imagery; and embeds carried the performance between sites. We Are Trees’ rooftop film can be traced through exactly that network. Nialler9 posted it on January 21, Turntable Kitchen directed readers toward the Yours Truly feature on February 1, Modern Mystery highlighted it on February 10, and MAGNET presented it later that month.

The sequence demonstrates that the video was not ancillary decoration. It became a second point of entry into “Sunrise Sunset,” capable of reaching listeners who had missed the EP’s original release. Each publication emphasized a slightly different feature—the Brooklyn setting, the live arrangement, the production team or the band’s sound—but all returned to the same performance.

What the session preserves

The most valuable music films do not merely document that a song was played. They preserve a relationship between composition, performers and place. “Sunrise Sunset” works in this format because none of those elements is asked to dominate. The song retains its patient structure, the players reveal the arrangement’s collaborative construction, and the rooftop adds openness without demanding a narrative of its own.

It also captures We Are Trees before the project’s identity could be simplified by hindsight. Nee was a songwriter with a solo project, a director of arrangements and a member of a changing musical collective. The debut EP was intimate in origin but ambitious in texture. The live group could translate that texture without reproducing every studio layer.

Viewed in that context, the rooftop is more than an attractive background. It is a practical stage for music poised between private composition and public discovery. The session takes a song born from a bedroom-pop process, places it above one of the world’s most photographed cities, and still keeps the listener’s attention on small decisions: a pulse held steady, a string line entering at the right moment, voices meeting without strain.

That restraint is why the film remains persuasive. It does not announce We Are Trees through spectacle. It lets “Sunrise Sunset” establish the project on its own terms—and, for the length of one complete performance, makes a Brooklyn roof feel like the natural home for its quietly expansive sound.