“Anonymous,” the hacker collective?
No, not that Anonymous!
The song on my album The Great Make Believer.
Probably the most fun I’ve ever had making a music video. (But I’ll get to that in a sec).
First, here’s how the song sounded when it was brand new:
A Hippo Walks Into a Beach House…
When it came time to track the tune, it was one of the batch we tackled at the “beach sessions.”
Which is just the placeholder name my friends and I have used to describe any of the albums by a handful of artists we’ve recorded in Seaside, Oregon. At a beautiful house overlooking the Lewis & Clark Salt Works.
You can see some of the makeshift studio in this video, with producer Rob Stroup set up just out of site (towards the end of the video) on a kitchen table past the stairs.
That’s Arthur Parker on bass. Anders Bergstrom on drums. Bob Dunham on electric guitar. Naomi Hooley on harmony vocals. Rob Stroup produced, engineered, and mixed. Nick Peets and Tim Huggins stopped by occasionally to provide, shall we say, inspiration.
It was tough to sing the lyrics correctly on the chorus because Arthur kept trying to throw hippopotamus and hypotenuse and monotonous into his real-time parody version, which got stuck in my head. Eventually I was able to tune him out and we captured a good take.
Anonymous was recorded almost entirely live — as was the whole album — but afterwards I went and added that little Casio keyboard part on the verses and a slide electric-guitar part on the bridge.
Then it was time for the music video…
What in the hell is happening here?
Well, I memorized my lyrics backwards.
I fell into a pool 75 times until my head hurt and my eyes stung with chlorine.
And good buddy Craig Saddlemire directed, filmed, and edited the whole thing.
Friends Doug and Anna showed up later to play the part of the mysterious watchers.
How to avoid shooting a bling bling 1990s pool-party music video?
Here’s the behind-the-scenes with all the secrets.
You can see me doing my backwards memorization homework, Craig’s choice of underwater cameras, and more:
LYRICS
I crowded out your better nature
I couldn’t outright break your heart
I couldn’t leave you, or forsake you
So I waited till you fell apart
But now that I’m on your side again
Do you think we can still be friends?
Now that we’ve made amends
Do you remember when you were mine?
Maybe love doesn’t have to end, sometimes
I want to go where I’m anonymous
Where goodbye and hello are synonymous
Where no one that we know will call upon us
and I want to go there
I want to go there