Feist from a distance

In the YouTube era, music videos should be stark and simple. Don't clutter the frame, choose primary colours, and pack the screen with tightly-cropped close-ups of the performers. That makes everything easy to follow, no matter what size your screen or what speed your your internet connection.

Never one to cling to convention, Feist has made a video that will be almost impossible to watch on your phone.

It's so lo-fi and grainy you could mistake it for a Ukranian pop programme at the height of the Cold War. All you see is a bunch of stick figures in a forest, shot from the safe distance of two miles away, for fear that the potent sexuality of rock and roll might send the nation's youth into a foaming frenzy of furtive frotting.

There are also some animated crows, and the biggest saxophone you have ever seen in your life.

Of course, because it's Feist, there is a REALLY DEEP THOUGHT behind the austere aesthetic and, cunningly, it links in to the song's title, Graveyard. Here she is to tell us all about it:

"I'm not talking about the Graveyard as a location, but of the entangled thoughts you get when visiting a graveyard. Usually you're there to visit someone who's died, and you think in broad terms about what they've become and your own mortality and about what time means. We're alone in the field, always at a distance. And people appear and disappear from your life."

Wow. She must be a right laugh at dinner parties. "Hey, this pasta is shaped like a spiral. Have you ever thought how life is like a spiral and we're all just sliding down it to our inevitable death, like a fusilli helter skelter of mortality?"

Luckily, she makes wonderful music. Including this song. So all is forgiven.

Feist - Graveyards

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