In recent days, Hayley Kiyoko has been releasing tracks from her I’m Too Sensitive For This Sh*t project, which isn’t a proper album, but a collection of singles that have followed her 2018 album, Expectations. Today, she has shared the final song from that project, “She,” which also got a throwback-style video, in which Kiyoko plays a younger version of herself.
In the clip, Kiyoko does what many other kids have done: She acts like she’s a superstar musician, playing for an imaginary crowd in her bedroom with dance-like-nobody’s-watching levels of enthusiasm. The video even features a cameo from NSYNC’s Lance Bass, as an image of him on a poster briefly comes to life and dances along to the song.
Kiyoko posted an Instagram video talking about making the “She” video, and she described the process as “emotional” and went into detail about what the song and its video mean to her:
“Growing up, I — I don’t want to say ‘hate’ because ‘hate’ is a strong word — but I disliked a lot of things about myself. I knew what I liked, I knew who I liked, I knew what I wanted in life, but I felt like my biggest enemy. I’d look at my idols and icons and I’d just be like, ‘Why can’t I be more like you,’ or, ‘Why can’t I look like this,’ or,’ ‘Why can’t I look like that?’ I used to beat myself up all the time, and it was a really difficult time in my life. It was hard, every day was hard. This music video is dedicated to that time in my life, where I’m celebrating who I am and who I’ve become, because when you’re going through it, you don’t see the big picture. […]
Now that I’ve survived middle school and high school, I look back at that time and I’m like, ‘Wow. All those really pivotal moments of my life have created who I am today, and they are the reason why I want to go on the stage and perform for thousands of people, and get girls’ attention, and do music videos, and all these things. All my insecurities are the reason why I became me. So, I want to encourage you all to keep going, keep pushing, keep moving, just keep moving forward.”
Kiyoko also shared a shout out to Bass on Instagram, posting a photo of her younger self with NSYNC and writing, “Thank you @lancebass for being such an inspiration to me and so many others. It was an honor to have you apart of this video and I keep pinching myself that it all came together!!! To celebrate here is a throwback from 2002 as I was internally screaming. You were just as nice then as you are now.”
Watch the “She” video above.
Hayley Kiyoko is a Warner Music artist. .
