L’anarchiste – “You Were a Saint” (video) (premiere)

Salt Lake City band L’anarchiste artfully combine ’80s pop, folk, and neoclassical elements on their new album Giant, and have just made a dreamy, haunting new video for the standout track “You Were a Saint”.

“‘You Were a Saint’ is an interesting piece of music for me,” says singer Rob LeCheminant. “I was wanting to challenge myself in how I could potentially add banjo to what was basically a pop song, so I created that bridge that really focuses on a cool blend of the acoustic sound of banjo and have it also be manipulated in weird ways.

“The lyrics were something that came fairly easily to me. I wanted to write something that was easy to relate to, so I focused on the idea of unrequited love. In my mind, this is something that most people go through at one point or another in their lives, multiple times for myself, really. There were times I just didn’t even have the words and I just let it go away, and those times were hard.”

Says director Andy Brimhall, “In the song I was drawn to this illusory lyric where Rob sings, ‘burn away my time.’ That sparked an idea to use fire as the main thread that takes us through the music video.

“We shot everything in one evening and one afternoon. Instead of using templates or stock footage I shot all the fire elements by burning objects that were the shape and texture of what I would be compositing them over, like hair. The next afternoon we shot our ‘cave’ sequence in an abandoned train tunnel on the west side of Utah Lake.”