Finally, The Winter Boyfriend Video

Last year I wrote a song. I sang it to myself a lot and talked about a lot and practicing it a lot with my friend Jez. At first I used to say ‘band practice’ in quotes because I reasoned that thirty-six year old public servants with no musical ability don’t really go to band practice, but after a while it seemed like a thing I actually did do so I just put it as a regular thing in my Google calendar. We recorded it Jez’s laptop in his bedroom and I managed to get a bunch of people together to run around Wellington to enact the music video I had storyboarded with post-its on my living room wall.

My other friend Jay would come over and sit on my couch and drink tea and eat gingernuts while we squinted at his laptop and I said things like “Do we have to go through the party scene footage to find .2 seconds of our buddies doing something cute?” while he fussed with fades and transitions and timing. We re-did the voiceovers and kept saying that we needed more time to finish it, that we would finish it, certainly, within the next couple weeks, a month at the outside. I told everyone I met that I was in a band and that I was working on a video, and they would say, “Oh, that’s cool,” and I would say, “Yeah, it’s fun,” all nonchalantly, or sometimes ‘Yeah, it keeps me off the streets,” like it was no big thing.

Then my mom called to tell me she had cancer and that’s all I could think about for a while. One time in Miami her best friend asked me what Wellington was like and I told her about the video shoots, how I had completely underestimated how difficult it would be, how nothing went exactly the way I thought it would, how much stupid silly fun we had on those three days. I told Mom about it and she said she was excited for me and my song and my video and that she wanted to see it when it was done.

When I came back to Wellington whatever mental real estate that wasn’t taken up by Cancer Sadness was taken up by band practice and recording and editing, and it’s been a real pleasure to have something very reliably happy and fun to do when I’m not furrowing my brow and worrying about everything else. It’s been really good to be able to talk about this, sometimes, when someone at a party asks how I’m doing and I don’t want to Get Into It, you know?

Here is the video for Winter Boyfriend:

And here, if you’re, like, less of a visual person, is the downloadable track.

And did I mention my bandmate also designs awesome t-shirts? He is clearly the brains of this operation. (He’s also the looks).

Since Winter Boyfriend I’ve written three other songs and Jez has written one more, and now that the video is done at last we’re going to work on recording those too, and maybe making some more videos (too soon?), and maybe playing some gigs around town that don’t take place in our buddies’ lounges, although so far in my vast gig-playing experience that’s my favourite kind. It seems as though–after wanting to be in one for like twenty years, can you believe it?–I’m finally in a band.