Throwback TikTok — STORYTOWN

I’m still finishing up a new song that has an interesting backstory, so in the meantime I thought I’d reprise one of the band’s earliest videos - one that you might have missed.

I had been brainstorming video ideas with music marketer Kevin Wortis, and I mentioned this great video that the Black Keys made for their song “Lonely Boy” — one continuous shot of a man dancing to the song outside his motel office. (FWIW Kevin’s new podcast production company Signal Co No1 is behind the excellent Wrongful Conviction podcast.)

At that time the mobile app Musical.ly was quite popular, and Kevin and I landed on the idea of creating a “fake” Musical.ly posting with friends dancing to the Storytown rocker “Run Run”. (The Musical.ly app faded briefly before it was reborn as TikTok when purchased by the China-based company ByteDance.

I remember coming up with “Run Run”’s rhythm guitar riff while sitting on the steps of a house we were renting on tiny Moshier’s Island in Portland’s Casco Bay. The melody came to me immediately, and a bit later, after some messing about upstairs in the house, I came up with the chorus chords and melody. Then the usual and vexing question — what is the song about? I already wrote about this in a very early blog post; apologies for repeating myself:

David Byrne, in his very excellent book "How Music Works", talks about how oftentimes music magically attracts the lyrics that are "meant" to be there. He says "... solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, somewhat surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency and sometimes even a narrative thread, even though those aspects of the texts weren’t planned ahead of time".

As I explained further in that post, this is what happened with “Run Run”. (When we play it live I like to say that this is a song about a “dysfunctional relationship”.)

Back to the video idea. I invited my daughters’ friends and parents over on a Sunday afternoon, also the band (although sadly Tony was unable to make it). I provided snacks and drinks, and my old friend Vinnie Grosso agreed to be DP. We filmed it all on an iPhone, and one of Kevin’s colleagues did the edit. Notably Stella refused to face the camera - you’ll know which one she is. BIG THANKS to Vinnie, the band, and the wonderfully joyous performances by Margot, Stella, Laiali, Gia, Polly, Otis, Fabienne, Julia, Stuart, Huck, Arnaud, Payal, Yukie, Sophie, Maud and Hanako.

So, enough of my vamping — here’s the video:

Hit me at guy@storytownband.com.

Until next week….