Surprisingly, the best songs about heartbreak aren’t slow, morose ballads; they’re the ones that inspire you to dance it out, wildly and erratically. In fact, they’re disco. Think about how good it feels to dance to “I Will Survive” (when it’s not a karaoke song). Or how satisfying it is, still, to sing along to Rilo Kiley’s “Breaking Up.” In that same vein, Mitski’s “Nobody,” the excellent second single from the forthcoming Be the Cowboy, is one of those gleefully heartbroken disco tracks.
The surreal, enjoyably weird video for the song is out today — watch below:
The video is directed by Christopher Good, and was shot over five days in Kansas City. Mitski shared and annotated exclusive behind-the-scenes images of the making of the video. Check them out:
“It was actually hard to get this one little shot where the magnifying glass goes directly in front of my eye, because in one swift motion I had to raise the magnifying glass at exactly the right angle where the camera catches my blurry eye right behind it. We did a lot of the shots in this video over and over, it had to be precise. And I loved every minute of it.”
“Me, absently fanning myself, not helping.”
“The producer Andreina Byrne placing all the cloth triangles on the floor in their respective, just-right places, which will most likely go unnoticed by the viewer, but it’s all these details we don’t notice that make each shot pop :)”
“Putting yellow stage makeup on the wall-arms. Later we discovered the makeup really does not want to wash off, and I wondered what kind of industrial-grade makeup remover is used by actors playing Elphaba in Wicked.”
“In the shot where I pop up on screen to lip-sync, I physically pop up on screen to lip-sync, as you can see from this picture where I’m waiting for my cue. Movie magic!”
“Filming the fake sitcom that shows up on the TV screen. Details!”