The opening shot of Ashley McBryde’s new video, “One Night Standards,” shows a janitor sweeping up broken glass in a seedy hotel’s parking lot. Cut to McBryde as the front desk clerk, who soon gets caught in a tangled web of lies and deceit ... and maybe even murder.

Sound dramatic? That’s just the beginning, because McBryde envisions this cliffhanger of a clip as the first of a trilogy.

“My manager John Peets and I had this idea to listen to the record and see what stories appeared … what threads of ideas were consistent in the songs we had gathered and what characters stood out,” she says. “Lo and behold, one night on the bus Chris Harris (acoustic guitar, mandolin, harmonies) and I were having a few beverages after a show. I got out my sketch pad and we wrote down each song from the record and each character. It looked like a crazy road map. It looked like a child had drawn it.

“But there it was,” McBryde continues. “A way to connect every song and every video. I showed it to Peets, and we put it in (director) Reid Long’s hands. And the rest is history.”