Toronto–based songstress Sam Casey wears her authenticity like your favourite pair of well–worn jeans. Her unfiltered and unapologetic songs are inspired by the past two years of her life: all the breakups, the makeups, the drugs, the dancing, the crying, the anxiety and the love.

Her passive aggressive song, “7 Second Superstar,” was inspired by TikTok fame. It comes off as judgmental because it is. Sam and her co-writers, Julianna Eye and Chloe Kay, felt critical of social media – TikTok in particular – and how it promotes a culture of one hit wonders. 

“Julianna, Chloe and I wrote this song over Zoom in 2021 with TikTok reaching its height of popularity and all of us being quite literally forced to participate on the app,” Sam explains. “After a conversation regarding our experiences in the early-2000s and late 90’s (before social media existed), we decided to try a blink-182 vibe and about two hours later we had a song.”

We caught up with Sam regarding her new video below!

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically?

7 Second Superstar is important to me because Chloe Kay, Julianna Eye, and I co-wrote it. Chloe and Julianna are two of the first co-writers I had the pleasure of working with. The writing process was such a surreal experience. Given that we were writing during the height of Covid, this session, like all our other sessions at the time, was executed over Zoom and produced after the fact by Mike Schlosser. I was still quite new to the industry when this session occurred, so I remember nervously preparing my shoebox-sized university dorm room while waiting for the Zoom to start.

This being so new to me, I was more comfortable discussing things I loved about the music industry and just all in all keeping it light and fun during sessions. However, Chloe and Julianna have a way of tearing down walls… so they quickly opened me up, and within an hour we were all chatting about our deep feelings, opinions, and grievances with the industry, social media, and the norms we had all been struggling to abide by.

We wanted to do a visual for this song because it was written about the pressure on all current artists to partake in Tiktok, and furthermore, keep a professional presence on each and every social media platform. We thought it would be a cool idea to create a visual that shows what we “have” to do as artists/creatives, and what we “really” do, as people.

2. What was the inspiration behind this video(visuals, storyline, etc.)?

The video is divided into two main visual aesthetics: Media Sam & Real Sam.

Media Sam: This aesthetic is illustrated with colourful streamers, BIG makeup and hair looks, shiny outfits, and social media mangers directing my every movement. My character seems distressed at times, switching between large toothy smiles to exaggerated eye rolls and faces of contempt at the overbearing social media manager. This Sam is supposed to be the Sam you see on the media: big, bold, and unapologetic, with a very evident lack of understanding when it comes to the trends of the media .

Real Sam: This portion of the video is a fairly accurate illustration of my life outside of my career. I have a pretty small but solid group of friends who are all quite creative in their own right. The video takes place in a mall and captures many organic moments of our friendships throughout the day. The director decided the best thing to do would be to just give us guidelines for each shot and then hit the music and see what comes out of it. This is personally my favourite section of the video as it makes the viewer feel warm and fuzzy on the inside… everyone has those people that you are really yourself around and you can tell that we feel that way about each other.

3. What was the process of making this video?

Moon Reel Media created, directed and produced this video. They had a very comprehensive outline of how everything was going to happen and (hopefully) look in the video. The filming was divided into the two aesthetics of the video; One day at the mall with my closest friends/creatives, and one day in a small studio filming the more produced (Media Sam) scenes of the video.

The day at the mall was truly a window into our world. We just shot the shit all day, jumped around from store to arcade to food court. There was pretty much no prep for this day and three of the five of us were battling a RUDE hangover on the day of the shoot, so we were extremely happy to be able to wear loose fittting clothes and stuff our face with good greasy food.

The day in the studio was like a fever dream. We had four hours to do make up and hair and at least three full performances for four different looks. It was definitely an uphill battle, but with the help of my shoot assistant Lindsay we were able to do superspeed changes… other than the latex, that took a MINUTE. All I remember from this day is glitter, streamers, latex and baby powder.