Tanner Sklove

Last month, Los Angeles singer-songwriter Jake Walden of Cotati came home to Sonoma County to shoot his new music video, and he recruited a little local help.

Tanner Sklove, 11, of Petaluma, appears in the new video for Walden’s “Even in Your Doubt,” as a younger version of Walden.

The video was filmed in Old Grove Redwoods near Occidental.

And while young Sklove neither talks nor sings in the video, he’s prominently featured at the beginning and the end.

The song is on Walden’s second CD, “Same Something Different,” released in July and funded by almost $23,000 contributed by Walden’s fans through kickstarter.com, a web site site that allows artists to raise money for their own projects.

See the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujOUPYN9sj8&feature=youtu.be

Walden, 33, whose name was originally Waldinger, attended Rancho Cotate High School in Rohnert Park and spent a year in Denmark as a exchange student. Then he went on to Santa Rosa Junior College before receiving his bachelor’s degree in drama from UC Irvine in 2000.

Jake Walden

His original goal was a career in theater and film, not music. As a teen-ager in the mid-‘90s, he performed in a series of Santa Rosa Players musical theater productions.

“I went to L.A. to pursue the acting dream,” he said. “I got my Screen Actors Guild card, but it just wasn’t for me. I was an extra on ‘Friends.’ Then I rented a piano, and spent a year learning how to play it, and found my voice.”

Walden recorded his first CD, “Alive and Screaming,” and established himself on the Los Angeles cafe circuit, playing regular gigs at the Hotel Cafe.

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