Lennon and Maisy – Boom Clap (2015)
Fame comes quick. Creativity, less so.
When British poptart Charli XCX (Charlotte Aitchison) appeared on Saturday Night Live in December 2014 two days before the release of her Sucker album, she was already known to the youngest segment of the show’s viewers courtesy of two singles released six months earlier in short succession. Each got heavy rotation on hit radio, and Charli was a thing.
The first of these gummi bears, Boom Clap, packed its three minutes with two eminently forgettable verses and a chorus that made zero lyrical sense, even as a hookline. Charli herself has spoken of it unlovingly, having modeled it after “childlike” europop with “dumb, hooky, shouty choruses”.
The song’s provenance told no heroic tale either. It was co-written by XCX herself, Fredrik Berger, Patrik Berger and Stefan Gräslund. Yup, it took four artisans to forge this paragon. And it was still cut from her debut album True Romance (2013). Then she tried to grace it to Hilary Duff for that singer’s upcoming Breathe In Breath Out (2014) album, but Hilary’s ‘handlers’ rejected the song because it “wasn’t cool enough” [ouch]. Chuck was devastated – how could Hilary reject my rejections? – and apparently, so was Duff, who claimed she never knew anything about the offer, and would happily have included it on her album.
So what do you do with a song that you didn’t want, your competitor didn’t want, and a pair of Bergers-plus-two are waiting to split royalties on? You put it on a movie soundtrack, naturally.
The Fault in Our Stars (2014) was no box office smash, but it was certainly one great place to drop this little bromide. And with its simultaneous release as a single burning up playlists everywhere, fourteen-year-olds were sate and Charli was all set. So happy was she that Boom Clap would finally find a home on her upcoming Sucker collection.
But the song itself still kinda, you know, sucked.
Six months later and six thousand kilometres to the west, two teenage sisters from rural Ontario went to work in Nashville (you can’t make this stuff up). 15-year-old Lennon Stella and her 12-year-old sister Maisy, who were already enjoying acting exposure on ABC‘s series Nashville, turned their considerable, wide-ranging talents to re-imagining Charli’s childlike Berger-ditty to highlight one single, solitary thing: Themselves.
The video is quite professionally produced, but as visually and texturally spartan as it gets. The girls stand a metre apart against a whiteout background, and aside from two expensive microphones, only a stompbox (for Maisy) and a Gibson amplifier (for Lennon, who gently pipes her baby-blue Italia guitar through it) litter the set.
[ed. Someone forgot to tell Lennon that if you’re going to buy a Gibson, make it a guitar. Kids.]
The re-make is arresting. Pure, unwarbling pitch-perfect voices call and answer one another over a thin, honest layer of guitar. That light touch reveals a shapely, almost elegant melody that was buried by overproduction and underperformance in the original version. At perfect moments in the chorus (0:48) and the a capella bridge (1:53), their voices come together in stained-glass harmony. Even the silly title lyric is given choreographic meaning in Maisy’s clever stompbox-plus-clap percussion; it takes bad text and lends to it a visual and musical purpose. Brilliant.
Best, the chemistry between them is absolutely electric. Their approving, loving glances at one another are quite simply why we were all put here on this earth. They get it.
Listen and watch, and read some of the comments. Two recurring themes among the chattering classes are “I’ve always hated this song until now” and “they moved me to tears”.
For a second day in a row… nothing more to say. Enjoy.
