Opening with the line “I’m not good when the party’s packed,” the newest single from POSTDATA (aka the solo project from Paul Murphy of Wintersleep) seems like a solid candidate for a socially-distanced performance video. “Nobody Knows” contains a laundry list of faults and insecurities bound up in a cheerful jangle and, appropriately, the new video playfully addresses the ominous pre-apocalyptic world we now find ourselves in.
For everything that seems to set Murphy’s teeth on edge, it seems like keep folks at a safe distance is not currently one of them. Recorded in isolation, he takes “Nobody Knows” another step further with a remotely filmed video, featuring an imposed Murphy “playing” in all manner of locations.
“During the first lockdown, when I was gearing up for planning the video, my brother Michael and I were talking about performance videos and the general weirdness of them, but then about how it’d be kind of interesting to try one with all the COVID protocols in place,” explains Murphy.
“So, I think it started as a dystopic idea for how shows in the future would be or something to that effect. Chris (Mills, the video director), loved the idea and thought he could expand on it with different visual techniques. We made some dialogue for it. Planned out scenes. The only issue is that we couldn’t travel to actually be in the same room to do it.”
The video has that animated cardboard cutout look similar to Wintersleep’s video for “Forest Fire” — uncoincidentally directed by Mills, an echo of Modest Mouse’s “Float On” and even Our Lady Peace’s “In Repair” which took a similarly dystopian bent nearly twenty-one years earlier. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and the last year has provided plenty of opportunities to revisit these fun approaches with fresh ideas.
“I got to explore some abandoned parts of Toronto with this Monstro zoom lens, and imagine Paul, Mitch, and other cool folks shooting and playing different kinds of ‘social distancing shows’ in these spots with this ‘scrapbook’ style approach to this project,” says director Chris Mills.
“There were these little glitchy moments throughout the video, and it felt like a loving, Kintsugi style approach to fill in these spaces with the most important heroes on the planet right now: Nurses, and people in PPE. What a fun, loving, and nurturing project and song.”
“Nobody Knows” will appear on POSTDATA’s forthcoming third album, Twin Flames, on March 5, 2021 via Paperbag Records.