“I was told to take out the sex scene but I fought for it,” says Los Angeles director Carmela Makela about her compelling new promo for Texas bluesman Gary Clark Jr. “I drove to Warner Brothers and asked to speak to the marketing manager and explain from a woman’s perspective.”

At seven-minutes long, her narrative of heat and heartbreak, desire and despair is by pop standards an epic, helped by the feral intensity of Clark Jr’s live performance. His guitar notes extended into waves of feedback and distortion that feel at once fuzzed-out Jimi Hendrix and yet somehow freshly minted. Makela mixes a portrait of nascent female sexuality that could not be better suited to the music’s roots in the blues.

“It’s that weird time before you are an adult, before you know—as a girl —that sex is supposed to feel good and you are supposed to know your worth, or that you have a choice.” Makela delivers a realism and intimacy here that lingers long in the memory, not least the image of her heroine’s palm pressed against the windshield. “That scene was my favorite to write, to shoot and to edit,” she says. “It is a moment that a lot of girls see and get a feeling in their stomach, because we’ve all been there. It’s a very real situation."

Tom Horan is Culture Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.

Gary Clark Jr Live is out now on Warner.