William Smyth

News & Updates

A global pandemic can’t stop art. But it can change how it is made. As social distancing became the norm this summer, Boston artists found innovative, simple and smart ways to make music videos. From breezy to intense, political to absurd, here are five gems with some insight on how they were created.

“Summer Hair,” Eddie Japan

Eddie Japan recorded a breezy-yet-dark single in “Summer Hair” by mixing trusted touchstones from new wave to baroque pop to indie rock. To match a visual with the vibe, the band got up when they usually go to bed and drove down to the Black Point ruins in Rhode Island. “It was really about taking advantage of a small window of time at a gorgeous location,” singer David Santos said. “Our video director, Will Smyth, who lives in Florida, was in town this past June and proposed a 4 a.m. shoot. Shooting the video was a way for the band to stay productive and safely connect in person for a few hours.”

There's a question that's haunted me since the first time I seriously listened to the Beach Boys as an adult: How can so much sunshine be so sad? In retrospect, the recognition shouldn't come as a surprise: I'm a Californian, and accustomed to sunshine. If we didn't learn to recognize sadness in the bright sun, we'd never see it at all.

Watching the new music video for Eddie Japan's “Summer Hair,” a song that appears on the band's 2019 EP, “The Amorous Adventures of Eddie Japan,” the question came to me again. Being familiar with the song and its scorching portrayal of a summer fling and its imminent ending, I found myself lost in the video's visuals. The band is shot performing on a cliff above the sea, a ruin of a building behind them. They're all vivid in the summer sunlight and ocean breeze, but there's a sadness built into both the song and the Will Smyth-directed video. The band is distant from one another — no doubt a product of social distancing — and, perhaps because this is being released in late summer, an ephemeral sense that the light is about to dim.