The Color Pink have released a new music video to accompany their latest single “Little Animals” out now.
The song started out as a simple riff which lead singer Mikey Iansito came up with on a synthesizer he purchased a day or two before writing the track. The lyrics to the song explore the idea that we have a deeper, inner instinct that often comes up to the surface, revealing our “little animals.” Mikey says:
“I had these dreamy chords kind of floating around in my head and I just happened to find a perfect patch on the keyboard to play them.”
Some parts of the song are darker than others, while others are brighter and full of sunshine! The lyrics are so risqué and suggestive, but because the music itself is happy and upbeat, it doesn’t sound too dark. The music video reflects this duality.
The idea for the video came about when Mikey thought it would be fun to include his 1974 VW Beetle car in a video and then relate it to the lyrics: “I thought, what if there are these girls in the car who just had a great day at the zoo, and they see this creepy animal playing guitar who is supposed to be so sexy and mysterious, but rather than be excited or impressed, they just drive away with it.”
After years of collecting camera equipment, the moment arrived when Iansito felt confident enough to dive into the world of music video production; the experience was made all the more enjoyable with the enthusiastic participation of friends who all had a hand in bringing the video to life.
Friend and guest guitar player Mike Malinowski was a special guest, who sported a bunny mask, embodying the little animal that becomes the source of laughter, and in a comical turn of events, he even took part in pushing Mikey’s car during the shoot.
The video was co-directed by Marissa DeMarco, who also makes a star appearance, contributing her talents and creativity to the overall success of the project.
Mikey’s musical journey began when exploring the piano at his grandparents’ house, moving to an obsession with synthesizers. Drums were his first instrument, which then turned him into a multi-instrumentalist. He later started recording material after receiving a zip disc recorder as a gift from his Uncle.
Their debut album “Mazes” displays the period of growing up as an teenager, with a vintage element. Seamless production, fun piano chords, synth textures and vocals explore retro-futuristic vibes.
Singer/songwriter Deirdre Murphy is the creator of many original works of music, dance, theatre, circus, and performance art. It’s evident in the music video for her neo-folk song “Sweet and Strong.”
The video is a depiction of a beautiful, light hearted, and sweet celebration of life and friendship. It’s a pure showing of loving life through dance and movement. There has never been a more lively, happy, or delightful music video. It’s freeing to watch these friends interact with each other in such a loving and open way.
We got a chance to speak with Deirdre about the music video and her intentions behind hit:
Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
This song has always called for a really physical video, in my mind. My friends and co-performers, Sean and Zsofia, are my training partners and former students. Zsofia asked me one day if her sister could come to class – she said, “She’s only 16 but she is sweet and she is strong.” And I went home and wrote the song. So it has that neat little tie-in, but also the song is about feeling really secure, really good, in your body and your surroundings which I wanted to get across in the video. My relationship with them routinely involves handstand training, acroyoga, many jokes, and bodywork/massage. I love the physicality of the practices themselves – the movement just feels good and practicing together is always great fun. I knew if I could get those elements captured, they would speak for themselves and they would speak visually for the song.
What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
Last summer I took up a new hobby with a friend, of rose smelling. We centered our efforts in the rose garden nearest my friend’s house – the one in the video.
A little known fact that is after about 30 or 40 minutes of smelling the roses, you are absolutely drunk on them. Heady. Our extensive research found that not only does it make you drunk, but also that about one in every ten roses smells exquisite (while some barely have any scent at all!). We further noted that about one in every twenty is magical beyond explanation – transcendent. These are the ones that cause a person to stagger. I remember one particular rose that we couldn’t stop smelling for a full 15-20 minutes, knowing that when we left it we would most probably never find it again. As we spent more time there it occurred to me that it’d be the perfect place to shoot a video for this particular song – it’s very much about stopping to smell the roses and appreciating the little moments.
I would fully recommend rose smelling as a hobby, by the way. It’s free, it makes you drunk, and there’s no learning curve – you walk in at the top of your game!
What was the process of making this video?
The process was just as fun as it looks! We were lucky to work with the wonderful Hannah Bloom, who has a real eye for movement and did a beautiful job with the edit. She used a vintage lens – which I think really adds to the feel – sort of old timey, and highly textured what with all the leaves and vines. I was able to work closely with Hannah on the edit and it was really lovely – she was a pleasure to work with. Sean and Zsofia were in fine form and a lot of craic was had, as is always the case with those two.
Irish alt rock artist Tadgh Billy King’s (pronounced like “Tiger” without the “er”) earliest memories are of literally living above a beloved New York City music venue, The Local 269, his parent’s owned and operated. During that formative time, he soaked in the rock, punk, jazz, and pop that soundtracked the bar’s existence.
This melting pot of sounds would be a template for his own unbound musical explorations where he often explored the music of the Ramones, Green Day, and Nirvana, alongside studying classical vocal and guitar techniques.
The self-reflective and introspective post punk and alt goth “mirror” is at once ethereal and chaotic, brash and sweet. Filled with chilling guitar ambience, goth-y, thick baritone vocals, and crushing walls of sound, it all leads up to a viscerally anthemic, gazy, wild, final chorus.
The music video reflects the darker, more gothic style of the song. He plays with angles and mirrors to symbolize his internal examination and self-reflection.
We got a chance to speak with Tadgh about the music video for “mirror”:
Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically inthis way.
Mirror is a song about self reflection. Its me taking a second to examine myself and take stock. At the time of writing it I was looking at where I’d come from, where I am now and how I’ve changed as a person over the last few years. I wanted the video to take the song further in this direction. With the visuals, I wanted to really lean into the goth rock-y style of the music and the introspective meaning behind the lyrics. I wanted to keep everything looking as dark and moody as possible to match the moodiness of the song.
What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
I’ve always really liked when artists are able to tell a larger story over a few different music videos. Even if its just a small easter egg or connection between their videos, I always appreciate it. I’m trying something like that with these videos and mirror, like “sit and wait,” is one piece of a larger story that will become clearer as more videos of mine come out.
I wanted this video to feel like a weird dream. I wanted to go a little deeper with this idea of self reflection and examination. This is where the visuals of me with my reflection come in. I wanted it to feel like I was stuck in this liminal space and by filming it on black it allowed me to play around with angles and have me really “examine” myself. I’ve also always been interested in playing around with the idea of reality and how dreams can sometimes feel so real it can sometimes really take a second to discern what’s a genuine memory of something that happened in real life and what’s a memory of a dream.
What was the process of making this video?
There were two main shoots for this video. The first shoot was done in a rehearsal studio here in Dublin that has these big floor to ceiling windows. We hung up some black material and filmed me standing next to the mirror at different angles singing the song and a few takes of me playing some of the guitar parts. Then the second shoot was me in the car. I chose some visually interesting locations around Dublin for me to get in and out of the car and then drove around the city shooting me from the back seat looking into the rearview mirror and the front seat.
I really wanted to play with what was real and what was the dream to try and give a sense that by the end of the video, when I get out of the car, its hard to tell if I’m still dreaming or not. Most of that came down to the editing process. This is the part of the process where I was really able to experiment with the different “mirror-on-black” angles and what meaning and feeling they give depending on the orientation. The car shots were pretty easy to edit, I could visualise what I wanted for them from the beginning of planning the video and was really pleased with how they turned out lighting-wise as that was just a complete luck of the draw.
It was a fun video to make. There will be another one for my next single “breathe out” that will come soon after the single is released on the 21st of July.
Boston’s Best Not Broken has built a reputation for high energy shows and catchy, power pop/rock original songs. Drawing from Brit Pop, Alternative Rock, New Wave, and their own unique brand of singer-songwriter sensibility, the band crafts soundscapes that appeal to fans of artists ranging from The Killers to Ed Sheeran.
Their thoughtful and, at times amusing, lyrics match the upbeat nature of the instrumentation, creating a fresh musical odyssey that is infectiously fun. Their live performances showcase the band’s contagious energy and often evolve into interactive dance parties where the onstage antics compel fans to rock out and let loose.
Their new song “I Don’t Belong,” and the video, explores adolescence and finding where you belong. It’s a tribute to those that never quite fit in in high school, but ultimately find their way. It’s also tribute to the many aspiring rock stars that never quite make it but have a treasure trove of memories to look back on.
We got the chance to speak with Best Not Broken about their fun and relatable video for “I Don’t Belong”:
Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
The song “I Don’t Belong” is a satire of a boy who graduates in the 90s, doesn’t align fully with any particular clique, dreams of being a rock star, but turns out to be just an average guy – which ultimately isn’t that bad! The song is intended to shine a spotlight on our inevitable silly high school regrets. The lyrics inspired the light-hearted, nostalgic video… which kind of wrote itself!
What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
This song was dripping nostalgic references to the 80s and 90s and we felt compelled to bring them to life in the video. There was no shortage of visuals to choose from – from the Rubiks cube to the mullets… sadly they all felt to natural!
What was the process of making this video?
We knew we wanted the video to be shot in a high school. So the first challenge was finding a high school that would actually let us do it. We had the good fortune of getting access to Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire, which really was designed perfectly for our intended scenes. We hired 106 Studios to handle the video production and collectively brought in our actors and built out the drama. We pre-ordered a bung of 80s and 90s paraphernalia, and after two days of camera work, we had enough footage to tell our little story. We were so lucky to find all the awesome actors and contributors. If you haven’t yet tried to shoot an era-specific nostalgia video, we highly recommend it.. ha!
Singer-songwriter Stephen Jaymes might be best described as Charles Bukowski ditching whiskey for psychedelic mushrooms while feverishly ingesting Rumi poetry and Phil Ochs records. The LA-based artist is a punk poet; a wounded-romantic; a sonic noir auteur and a post-apocalyptic hippie. He is a gifted multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, and producer. His music exudes the stylish playfulness of Prince with clever turns of phrases and occasional funk flashes, but it also conjures the stateliness and mystique of Leonard Cohen. Film and television editor Christal Khatib (Scandal, Transparent) hears “both of those ghosts and Johnny Cash too – all visiting the same body.”
His newest song “Chief Inspector,” and the accompanying video, is a noir inspired Jungian tale of a man who once locked up his shadow and is now hunted by it.The video reaches back in time to say a little something about the present moment. Wanting to evoke the LA noir imagery used in the song’s lyrics, the singer and the video’s producer Ross Kolton, were drawn to the iconic 1973 Robert Altman classic “The Long Goodbye” for its visually unique take on noir in the sunshine.
Easter eggs and direct references include a shot of Jaymes leaving the same tower apartment complex where Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe eked out a living. The film classic is noteworthy for looking back to the 40s to shine a light on the (then) current 70s culture. Similarly, Kolton and Jaymes look back to the 70s to indirectly reflect a modern Instagramed world, where a noir thriller of dark realities continues to unfold, now through millions of sunny lenses.
We spoke with Stephen Jaymes about the new video for “Chief Inspector,” which you can watch below:
Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
In a nutshell, this is what happens when you start digging deeper into Jung while watching the Inspector Morse series. The song is about the choice we make to lock up a part of ourselves to achieve our (often stupid) objectives, and how that shadow part always escapes and hunts us down later. Morse is a hero of mine, the original “true detective” of modern television who is chased as much by his own ghosts as he is by the flesh and blood criminals. It was a rare instance where the lyrics all pretty much fell out in one go. I’d pay to have that experience every time. And what fell out was a “Cape Fear” scenario: Robert Mitchum is not happy; and he’s out to get you; and he’s you. In my case, I later realized, my shadow was hunting me down to demand I start writing and playing more music.
What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
The video is the result of my collaboration with LA-based filmmaker and music video producer Ross Kolton. We both have a deep love of noir, so we were looking for a reference point that we could use. We wanted to literalize the song’s dark noir imagery and psychological tension, but also reflect how noir films frequently juxtapose that darkness against sunny LA. Our eureka moment came in the form of Ross’s idea to use the location from Robert Altman’s 1973 “The Long Goodbye” in the video. From that seed of an idea we found our story, and the video ended up being an homage to that film in many ways (toxic suitcase MacGuffin notwithstanding).
What was the process of making this video?
The goal was to make a tight doppelgänger drama that reaches back to “The Long Goodbye” to illustrate the tension between today’s dark realities and their sunny, Instagrammed exterior. Ross is super organized, so many of the shots were his ideas that we basically tested in the field. He has an approach to film that really synchronizes with my approach to songwriting: both of us leave a ton of room to capture the magical accidents in our creative process. On shoot day we started in the Hollywood hills where we paired a condo interior with the actual exterior of Elliott Gould’s apartment complex. We had a location waiting on the Westside for the “arrival” part of the story, so we literally worked our way east to west through Hollywood, stopping at some planned places and others that jumped out at us as we drove around. By the time we had finished with all the exterior “story” shots, we were exhausted. After he put together the first cut, Ross decided that the lip sync performance shots reflected that exhaustion. So we reshot the performance, weeks later, after I’d buzzed my head. This resulted not only in a treatment that better reflected our “sunny noir” aesthetic, but also emphasized better the doppelgänger theme because I look so different. Just another example of staying loose and allowing experimentation (and some director perfectionism) to work its magic. Thankfully I had no deadline as we hadn’t set a release date for the song yet.
Irish alt-rocker Tadgh Billy King (pronounced like “Tiger” without the “er”) is a multi-faceted an actor, writer, director, a composer for theatre, and an award-winning classical singer. He didn’t set out to re-create the sound of frustrated punk rock in his song “sit and wait,” instead he’s unapologetically adding to the conversation through a modern lens with this new release. The result is a blistering, blunt and rousing ride through noisy hardcore, math-y punk and gazy walls of sound. At times brash, at times sublimely ethereal.
Tadgh’s immersive artistry speaks to its conception during times of deep introspection. His cathartic musicality spans post-punk, goth, noisy hardcore, and math-y punk, and is inspired by such artists as Bauhaus, Drive Like Jehu, Fugazi, Joy Division, Nirvana, Radiohead, and contemporary Irish bands such as Fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital, Gilla Band and Just Mustard.
The video for “sit and wait” depicts Tadgh’s blunt outlook on the world that surrounds with us bright colors and moving images over stagnant objects that reveals the subtle undertones of confusion and frustration that sits with a lot of younger people today.
We got the chance to speak with Tadgh about a more in depth look into his music video. Watch and read below:
Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?
The song is trying to encapsulate a feeling, which seems to be pretty rampant among late-teen to early-to-mid twenty year olds. It’s a sort’ve existential dread that is hard to articulate. I think it comes from a recognition that there’s a lot of problems in the world today and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of clear, viable ways to fix them. So it can feel like people can find themselves sitting and waiting for something catastrophic to happen. While, at the same time, they’re just trying to figure out their own lives. The song is about that frustration. We are left discussing the things that disappoint us, but some of these things are completely out of our control. And then, sometimes, these discussions we have with each other can cause internal rifts within friendships and relationships.
With this video, I wanted to try and capture these feelings. I felt that by filming people in their late teens and early twenties moving through their own emotions and navigating relationships, while also projecting some weird, beautiful and disturbing imagery that falls within the themes I’m talking about in the song onto them, I could capture and convey this strange feeling we all have for our collective future.
What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
I always thought that projection onto a body was really cool. There’s a really interesting theatre/dance company in Australia called Chunky Move and I remember watching a video for this piece they did called Mortal Engine and just being completely enamoured by it. My video is very different to that piece, but it sparked my interest in using projection onto people. I got a hold of a little projector and thought “this is perfect.”
I also really enjoy art that on the surface is really colourful, vibrant, attractive and interesting to watch, but if someone was to look deeper or read into it more they could start discovering multiple layers or narratives to the piece. In this video, try following the couples and seeing what narratives you put onto them from just the emotion you see on screen. What overall narrative or storyline jumps out at you when all the elements (the couples interacting, the emotional expressions from the performers, the lyrics and music, the images being projected) are combined? I know what I was trying to say with the song and video, but that doesn’t matter anymore. What’s really interesting to me is how my intention with the art isn’t important after a certain point. What really matters is what the audience or the viewers pick up and what they project (haha get it) onto the video.
Late in the process came the idea of adding the first scene of me coming into my room and the last scene of me waking up. This is part of a larger narrative that will unfold across my music, but you’ll just have to follow along to see where it goes.
What was the process of making this video?
When I decided that I wanted a lot of people for the video I just started asking my friends. Everyone you see in the video (all credited in the video description) are artists themselves who are either studying or working (or both) in Dublin and Ireland, creating work that helps to make the city and country more vibrant every day.
For the background video that was projected onto the performers I compiled footage of anything that was interesting to me and fit the vibe of the song. Then I messed around with the colours to make them more vibrant and built the video around the song.
I wrangled as many people as I could together and did a few takes with them in front of the camera and projection, trying out different things that I, or they, thought could be interesting. I directed them through different emotions, asked them to just stare deadpan into the camera, asked them to debate a few different things with each other (nothing incredibly serious), took them to extremes and just kinda had fun with it. Once everyone else was recorded I filmed myself singing the song. Ultimately, I wanted to let the imagery and people in my video do the talking. Editing it took a little bit of time, just because there was so much footage, but it was a very fruitful experience that allowed me to create something interesting to watch.
The lasting message I want this video to have is that despite life’s challenges, building a positive community and creating art that inspires you is the way forward. The making of this video itself is an example of that. I hope this inspires others to make cool art with the people around them.
Modern Mystery 
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