Dressed In Pink

The first music video for Normandie Wilson is Tired of Being Nice went live on San Diego's best music blog, Owl and Bear on Tuesday. Thanks to my friend Chris Maroulakos for making it happen when I was feeling super stressed. Owl and Bear does great concert giveaways and is always writing about great music, so check them out.

The video is for a song called "Dressed in Pink," which was also the first single off the album. I'm so happy to have found a wonderful crew of people to help me bring the video to life. 

Dave, Mikko, Sam, Howard, and myself worked all day creating the backdrops from cardboard and hanging the backgrounds. Everything you see in the video was made by our motley crew. Kay Piper is responsible for the videography, and Symea Solomon is my fellow journeywoman through the land of heartbreak and hard lessons. I styled the video and did makeup. I was very grateful that both Kay and Symea met us as total strangers off of craigslist and placed their trust in me enough to come over to a house full of strangers and make some art. I'm touched, dahling, I'm touched.

 

The entire day and night before were a stress-filled blur, to be honest, but I had a really great time creating with my friends. We took a giant dead piece of bush that had been in our front yard and I spray painted it pink and then threw on a ton of glitter. Mikko had driven down from Chico to deliver me a marimba that I purchased from him and happily jumped in. Dave painted many of the trees, Sam painted the trunks and then she and I worked on backgrounds and the ocean waves. There was a lot of cutting and curse words and panic, but we got it done.

It's sometimes very frustrating to be an artist without a huge budget for these things, and sometimes it's magical. When you can't do the huge video shoot you wanted to do because you can't hire someone and you can't hire a film crew, and you can't execute your original idea because it's too expensive, you come up with something else. That is, if you really want to do it. And I make art only because I want to. That's all I got. The only thing I wanted to do was create a world of my own, and keep on the path of tightening up my aesthetic, and 'with a little help from my friends,' we did that, so I'm stoked. 

 

The story of the song is as follows: 

Symea Solomon

Symea Solomon

"She walks towards me in a colorless concrete bar, dressed in pink. Head ­to­ toe pink. Pink hat, pink scarf, pink coat, pink purse. I believe at the moment I'm wearing pink lipstick as well, and we begin talking about... the color pink.

She's, of course, effortlessly French, utterly Parisian, and her lips quiver in the way that only native French speakers manipulate their mouths, kissing the words out of her pink ­lipstick-covered lips. I've never spoken to this woman in my life, and within minutes, she's telling me about her lover, a married man. She speaks of him in an indifferent fashion, but her pout gives her feelings away. “I know he'll never leave his wife...” her words trail off into my drunkenness.

I look at this beautiful woman, dressed in pink, and can't understand how anyone wouldn't take her into their arms and love her relentlessly. At this point in the night, I'm extremely drunk, so I stumble across the street and open up the apartment window that offers a street­ level view of the bar. I plop myself down on the floor with my midi keyboard and write this song as my thoughts drift to all the people in my life who never loved me, and all the time I wasted on them..."

Don't let this happen to you you! Learn from my mistakes, dearies. Don't waste your time on people who don't love you. xoxo