The electro-pop duo has recently finished a co-headlined mini tour across Ontario and Quebec with For Esmé, and after opening for Canadian icons such as Mother Mother, Alessia Cara, and Scott Helman, Featurette is back with yet their third single of the year, "White Rabbit". See my chat with the Toronto group below.
Your third single of the year, “White Rabbit” was just released last week, what inspired it?
---> Firstly - thanks so much for chatting with us! We always love doing interviews with The Music Enthusiast <3! White Rabbit was inspired by the Climate Crisis that we’re in at the moment. It’s very much on my mind all the time, but the tough part really is writing about these things and having people pay attention. I think if you listen to the song on its own, it could be about a relationship of any kind, but in this case (especially paired with the video) It’s actually about our relationship with the planet. It’s addressed to people that don’t think they’re part of the problem, that their impacts won’t make a difference, so it’s not worth the effort to make better decisions for all of us. It’s a call out that it’s time for change and that we all need to start doing our part.
If people went to your shows during your past tour with For Esmé, they’d recognize the song, because you played it during your set, are there any differences or similarities between the reactions at the shows and the ones online?
---> Oh MAN! When we first played that show at our Toronto show right before we went on tour with it we had a packed house at Adelaide Hall and I was doing my thing as usual, our Toronto fans know how to party! But then we played White Rabbit and it was the first *new new* material we were playing in that set - I remember playing the first verse and it felt like the energy had dropped, because it’s kind of sparse music and slower, people were really focused instead of just in party mode you know? And then when the chorus hit… I thought the floor had fallen out of the room it’s like EVERYONE felt it and reacted so strongly - it was such an amazing feeling. I was so nervous it wouldn’t hit that way - I freaked out inside when it did! I feel we got a very similar reaction from the music video as we did to the live show. We had done this super low budget, DIY styles, and really didn’t have it ready until the day before it came out, so we were all super nervous because we really hadn’t seen the final product! I mean if you just look at the concept for it I literally approached Marc, who produced the track and was going to shoot the music video, and was like: ’So what if we were digging in a giant pit in animals masks and like high-fashion hazmat suits’ - so if you take that at face value, we weren’t sure how it was going to turn out right?! A bit out there! But then Marc is a literal genius so he brought it together with master level wizardry.
It seems like there are a lot of different animals involved in this new era of Featurette, was this planned originally?
---> There totally are - there are flower head people too! I’ve done the Production Design for all the music videos we put out this year which has been an absolute blast. I love making art, and I love animals even more, so I think that was just naturally going to come into our work. What you get with Featurette is a lot of Jon and I - the sounds, especially the drums and beats and bass, are all very Jon. The visuals and the lyrics and mood is very me, it’s usually a super dark fusion between those two ideas, and animals play in that really well. There’s a little tease in all this that I haven’t mentioned anywhere yet, but we’ve settled on our album title (!) and as a result the moods of all the videos we’ve made so far are all based on dreamscapes - and in some cases dreams I’ve actually had. In all my dreams the one theme that’s true is that people don’t have faces, so I wanted to keep that theme in the music videos we’re putting out right now. It’s been planned since we shot Million Things over last winter, and I fell so in love with the idea of ‘faceless’ characters in our music videos that I wanted to keep that going! Making the flower head masks in Million Things inspired me so much.
What do all the animals represent? Do they all represent something different? Or no?
---> All the animals represent different characters, just like the people you meet in your dreams. Even all the way back to our very first music video ‘Broken’ we had those faceless mannequins on the sides of the set - I’ve always had this fascination with the anonymity of figures in your dreams. They can have such an impact on you that you remember it throughout the whole next day, or even days later, but they were all a fabrication of your own thoughts. I just think that's so cool I wanted to bring that to life. The bunny in White Rabbit was an obvious choice because the lyrics came first (and I wanted a mask that was angular and caught the stark light we were planning!), but the cats in Million Things just seemed to go with the mansion. Fun fact: there is a cat that lives in that mansion that looks exactly like the cat in my lap and the big cat head - so that’s where that came from! In DKNMWY we had the cyber-punk inspired masked dancers - those were largely human or maybe a little alien. In any case just the lack of identity plus chilling lasting imagery is what they bring to the table.
Each music video of yours just gets better and better! How do you come up with the ideas for them?
---> This last one we had a SUPER DUPER short timeline, we literally decided to make it on a whim. No budget, no time - I was sitting on the couch with my friend Sharon and just spitballing ideas - anything we could do quickly and easily. We went through a few (which I may totally use later!) but landed on this one because the imagery went so well with the story - grave digging. Of course it turned out super complicated and intense (lol) but the CONCEPT was just a simple one-shot single take of Jon digging, and getting deeper into the ground with me singing in front. The only plot was that he would find the box at the end, and what’s in the box, that’s for you to decide. I know what I found ;)
I totally understand if you can’t reveal this just yet, but your album is coming out in the new year, how many more singles are yet to be released until the album release?
---> There is one more track that will be coming, but I haven’t decided if it’ll come right before, or right after the album release as a feature single. I CAN tell you though, that I definitely know which one it is, and we’ve very much saved the best for last… ! ALBUM COMING: JAN2020!
As said in the interview, keep an eye out for Featurette, especially because they'll be releasing one more single, then their newest album. I can say for a fact that they'll both blow your mind.
Stream "White Rabbit", here.