The music video for the Brooklyn artist’s sweet new single is the Ferris bueller-inspired living-room dance party of our quarantine dreams
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If there was a Spotify Wrapped equivalent for the places where we spent the most time in 2020, for most of us it would look like this:
- Your Apartment
- LOL – nah, that’s it
In some seriously twisted irony, for the first time in our NYC lives, many of *actually* got our rent’s worth as our apartments served double/triple/quadruple duty as not just homes, but offices and gyms (in theory), bars (in reality) + the settings for so… so… so (ugh) many zooms.
But whether you’ve gotten a tad sick of life between your own walls or you’ve accepted your newfound agoraphobia, just in time for the weekend, I’m here to make the case for livening up your Netflix-and-actually-really-just-chill routine, re-embracing your space and making the transition from fetal position to ~fiesta~ a la Brooklyn artist Ben Rice, whose sweet new single and seriously delightful music video I’m pumped to premiere here!
“Taste Like Sugar” offers the perfect dose of feels-so-good indie pop—one that hits that sweet spot without, like, giving you a cavity (SRY COULDN’T HELP IT)—and the video serves as the perfect companion: a fun and satisfyingly silly story in which a mopey evening in pajamas at home transforms into a pandemic-perfect party for ~1 with the instant/easy addition of a jacket, some shades and an imaginary backup band.
Ahead of the premiere, Ben—who also owns and runs Gowanus recording studio Degraw Sound—shared a little bit about the song and video, for which he happened to enlist artists from a couple of my fave BK bands (a great surprise and yet another reason to love it):
“I had the lyric ‘every corner tells a story’ for a while and the song grew out of that idea – all of these places that we walk by everyday have these hidden stories attached to them from the significant moments in people’s lives that have happened there. As the song evolved and I started producing it out, it wound up being a bit more on the indie-pop side aesthetically, so I wanted to do something fun and a little bit ridiculous with the video. I was like ‘what if Ferris Bueller was writing a song and an imaginary band showed up to play the song as it was being written and then it turned into a bedroom dance party?’ Let’s try to do that. Fortunately my friend Abner James [Eighty Ninety] , who’s done all of my videos for this record, and Aida Mekonnen [Forever Honey] and Charlie Culbert, who are playing in my ‘live band’ (if we ever can play live music again) were all down to go for it.”
“Taste Like Sugar” is out today! Queue it up, then order some drinks from Drizly + snacks from Seamless and send a Postmate to Party City for a disco ball ASAP. Staying is the new… uh, staying in. And if we’re going to do everything in our apartments until herd immunity hits, well, you better believe we’re doing this right—
And it all starts with the right music (+ apparently a little pleather and some pajama pants).
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Follow Ben Rice at @benricemusic, add him to your Spotify playlists and find all things Ben Rice at benricemusic.com.