Couldn’t Be Happiers Premiere Playful Video with Serious Message for ‘Plastic Bag Odyssey’

“Paper or plastic?” asks Jordan Lee Crosby in the role of grocery store clerk at the beginning of Winston-Salem indie-folk duo Couldn’t Be Happiers’ new video for “Plastic Bag Odyssey (I’ll Never Die),” which we’re premiering below.

“Whatever’s easiest,” says Jordan’s bandmate and wife Jodi Hildebran Lee, playing a distracted shopper.

Following the contemplative yet jaunty strum of Jordan’s guitar, the propulsive thump of Jodi’s upright drum kit and the pair’s conjoining warm harmonies, the video, shot and directed by musician and music producer Mike Bennett, intercuts the duo busking outside the store with scenes of a frustrated Jodi trying to push her cart down the grocery aisle past an oblivious floor-sweeping Jordan, who is blocking her path.

Jodi takes lead vocals as the duo lip sync into a broom handle and a wine bottle as microphone substitutes. The song’s lyrics present the point of view of a plucky, destructive and indestructible plastic bag:

“I was born to help you with your groceries/ Carry your milk and toiletries/ Then I hung out in your bathroom/ Contained your trash and old perfume…”

After the bag escapes a landfill, its ensuing adventures include wrapping itself around a duck’s bill and then heading out across the waves to nearly strangle a sea turtle.

Composing a ballad for a plastic bag

“I was sitting in the hair salon one day … and I just looked out at the parking lot,” Jodi says, remembering what inspired her to write the song. “I saw this white plastic bag tumbling across the asphalt [of the parking lot], and I had this idea, like what is this bag going to see and do? It’s going to be around a lot longer than I am.”

Jodi recalls how the thought made her shudder.

“I [started] thinking about all of these unintended consequences of things that we do as a society to try to make our lives more convenient — and it ends up we’ve got plastic bags killing sea life, and filling up landfills and never degrading.”

Jodi started typing out the song’s lyrics on her phone while still in the salon chair. She ran to the car without getting her hair dried, hummed the song’s melody into her iPhone and wrote the rest of it as soon as she got home from work that evening.

The song originally appeared on Couldn’t Be Happiers sophomore album Couple(t)s, which is being released in an unusual and thematic way. The title of the LP refers to the Lee’s relationship status as a couple as well as their favorite poetic device, the couplet, which is a pair of lines in a poem, often with similar syllabic patterns, that convey a single idea.

In keeping with the “couplet” theme, the album is being released in two parts, with each part consisting of six songs organized thematically into pairs. Side A, which dropped in mid December, includes two love songs, two folk storytelling songs and two protest songs – one of which is “Plastic Bag Odyssey.”

Fittingly, the verses of “Plastic Bag Odyssey” are all composed of couplets.

Side B of the LP, which is scheduled to release in June, follows the same meter as Side A, with songs paired according to themes.

Jordan was a law student at Wake Forest University when he met Jodi, a graduate of Wake Forest Law School, at an old time bluegrass pickers’ circle associated with the schools’ alumni and students. Jodi remembers that Jordan showed up wearing a Sasquatch shirt and played a song he had written called “Gone Squatch,” about a bigfoot hunter who gives up his life to pursue the cryptid in the Pacific Northwest.

Jordan and Jodi were each seeing other people when they met, but by 2017, the pair had split with their respective spouses. Jordan moved to Winston-Salem from his hometown of Dallas, Texas, to be with Jodi and the pair have now been married for over six years. Since both partners loved to sing and play they became the performing duo Couldn’t Be Happiers.

“We started just playing at local breweries and smaller gigs and just kept going,” Jodi says. “Here we are in 2025 and we’re still doing it and we love it.”

“Gone Sasquatch” appears on Couldn’t Be Happiers’ first album Songs for Butchie, which refers to the nickname for Jordan’s father John Lees who passed away in 2020.

Songs for Butchie was released in three installments, the first of which dropped in November 2021.

Playful style, serious message

Filmed in and outside of Acadia Foods, a family-owned deli, coffee shop and market in Winston-Salem’s Washington Park neighborhood, the video for “Plastic Bag Odyssey” remains playful throughout its nearly four-minute runtime, including a cameo from all four of the couple’s dogs in the final scene.

Despite the wholesome vibes of the visuals, the sprightly satirical tune and accompanying video’s message is far from featherweight, all the more pertinent in a time when so many residents of western North Carolina are still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Helene and southern California is in the midst of devastating fires.

The lyrics allude to climate change with a mention of a parking lot that’s too damn hot, and the final verse envisions a future where only trash like plastic shopping bags remain.

“Maybe one day I’ll get launched into space/ Leave this world without a trace/ Except for all the damage that I’ve done/ Way back when I was young…”

Jodi hopes the song will remind people that there are little things we can do every day, to make a difference. “You know, like bringing your own bags to the grocery store, or choosing paper.”

Even though average people can make a difference, the burden of stewardship of the environment shouldn’t be all on us, Jodi adds.

“We do have huge multinational corporations that can make a much bigger impact on the environment if they wanted to,” she says. “It’s just that they don’t want to.”

Like the best protest folk music, “Plastic Bag Odyssey” nods to a shared past and vows for a better future. It’s a warning shot across the bow before our seas turn to vapor, our forests become the ghost of woodsmoke and our planet releases the last red breath of dying embers.

Find Couldn’t Be Happiers’ Couple(t)s Side A streaming on multiple platforms here or visit their website.