A few green leaves flutter with the wind, held down by two peaches, grapes, and a large pomegranate. The colors of the fruits contrast against the scratched wooden table they sit atop, and the whole scene feels like it’s straight out of a still life you’d see in a museum. Before you know it, you’re staring at Matthew Connor holding a basket of fruit, standing in his underwear.
The lighting and colors are reminiscent of artwork because it’s inspired by it: in fact, Connor revealed the video’s style was based on the work of Caravaggio—in particular, his paintings of young men dressed up as Bacchus, holding fruit, and lazing about. It helped that Connor’s longtime collaborator Anthony Grassetti is also a big Caravaggio fan. “Once we discovered we had that in common, we were off to the races,” Connor says.
“I wanted the video to be very still, seductive in a languorous way, a bit inscrutable, and very gay—Caravaggio was a natural fit,” Connor explains. “I also liked the idea of posing, and drawing attention to the posing, sexuality as a performance of sexuality. In the words of the great Róisín Murphy, ‘I just don’t know who’s exploiting who.’”
There’s certainly an air of seduction in the video; at times, Connor poses with a red cloth draped over his shoulder, and at others, he’s naked and slowly lifting a bunch of grapes. But it’s the long and slow blinks as he adds a word—”still”—that transforms his previous question, “Are you so sure that this is only physical?” into an accusation or doubt of sorts. Whatever the relationship was before, it no longer seems limited to purely physical intimacy.
It’s not just the visuals themselves that plant strong imagery into the listeners head; lines like “You got a phone number written on your palm you smear down my back” can make listeners almost feel a streak of black ink painted onto their bodies.
Back in 2013, when we asked Matthew Connor to describe his music without genre names, he said “I always like to think of myself as an old-fashioned crooner with a little bit of an update.” Today, though his music has changed shape over the years, he still feels the same way, with a darker twist. “I would describe myself as: a little slinky, a little spooky, a little haunted, a little horny, an opera singer lost in an old country song, Portishead meets Elvis, midnight at the Roadhouse.” Though the video itself may not have an especially spooky feel, the music has a weight to it, amplified by the way it sometimes suddenly snaps.
The video, shot late last summer, went through many iterations, but below you can watch it in its final form: