Caroline Polachek’s recent single “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” is about trying to keep it together when you’re too far away from somebody you want so badly to be near. So, in her new video for the track, Polachek decided to play off that by dancing around (with moves inspired by line dancing and Scottish folk dancing) in a literal personal hell.
Polachek says of the video:
“The song is about being painfully far away from someone you’re crazy about but still trying to keep your cool, which as everyone knows is a private kind of hell. I was thinking about the watercolor scenes in Ren And Stimpy where they’d depict the inside of their minds, and also the sequence in Disney’s Little Mermaid when Ariel’s voice gets pulled out of her… it’s all so psychological. But the thing about personal hell is there’s a lot of time to kill and there’d better be a dance routine… so I played with the shapes from American line dancing and Scottish folk dance — they both have lots of kicking and stomping and hands on hips.”
Polachek was recently interviewed by Christine And The Queens for Out Of Order Magazine, and she said of the motivations behind Pang, “I went though a few months in 2017 of constant adrenaline surges. It was euphoric sometimes but nightmarish too cause I couldn’t sleep and lost my appetite, started to drop to an unhealthy weight. At one point i’d arrived in London for a writing trip and was wide awake as the sun came up, heart beating really fast for no apparent reason, and realized the only way to describe the feeling between my ribs was a ‘pang’; both from the adrenaline and a deeper kind of hunger. It hit me that ‘panging’ was a quality I’d always looked for in music — a twist of private longing, but not a grand gesture… just a twist, hiding in the core of something else. So I dedicated the record to that idea.”
Watch the video for “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” above.
Pang is out 10/18 via Columbia.
