behind the music video with Cocojoey

I Enjoy Music now has a special sibling website, I Enjoy Music Videos. If you enjoy music videos, you'll like it very much...

I love music videos... and also, I love cats. This love is both ancient and quite new. Growing up, my sisters and I didn't have pets of our own—other than a sweet guinea pig named Minnie who was treated like a queen (she ate romaine lettuce while our family settled for iceberg, for example)—but there was a cat named Princess (a fluffy tuxedo, if I recall correctly) who wandered our neighborhood, and I adored her.

Over the years I developed an affinity for my friends' cats, but it wasn't until we brought a stray cat into our house last year that I truly began to understand the unique love a kitty can galvanize. Our wonderful boy is named Magellan, and I kiss his head 30 times a day and call him "Mr. Buddy" and "Muffin Man," and sometimes he attacks my feet with his hands which are secretly full of steak knives, and I love him soooo much. He just sat down next to me and curled into a little croissant.

Cocojoey definitely understands this level of feline infatuation. The Chicago musician has a song called "MIDNIGHT LICKING HOURS," a deliciously maximalist paroxysm of synth keyboard jubilation, which was a reader pick for favorite song of 2025; its subject is, essentially, how annoying (and also how weirdly inspiring) it is when your cat wakes you up in the middle of the night by licking your face. "He's stretchy and elastic, tiny bones of soft plastic...how can he live so free?" wonders Cocojoey as keyboards sproing amid the deranged organ sounds of an especially hyperactive game of baseball. It's such a bop...

...and it has an equally fabulous music video directed and edited by Videomancer, with Cocojoey becoming a video game avatar in a chaotic digital world, accompanied by a dancing cat (that would be Coco, who inspired the song). There's even an interactive version of the video where you can change the camera angles or add additional cats to the mix. It's the perfect colorful, bonkers visual accompaniment to a colorful and bonkers song.

I asked Cocojoey about how the video to "MIDNIGHT LICKING HOURS" got made—below...answers...

[Molly Mary O'Brien] The song is so fun!! At what point did you start thinking about a music video for it? Did you have any initial inspiration, stuff on your 'moodboard,' any particular goal you were trying to achieve in making a visual for the song?

[Cocojoey] Thank you! I had a lot of fun making this track and I knew that I wanted to do a video for it as soon as I wrote the first chorus. I feel sentimental about many games for the original PlayStation and have a big place in my heart for 5th gen style low-poly graphics. A few tracks on the album are inspired by one of my favorite games called "Threads of Fate," both in spirit and via Junya Nakano’s soundtrack. I knew something that looked akin to this game's visual style would be perfect, specifically the Mel’s Atelier location (my song ODD EYE SLIDE is literally meant to take place here within the Poppel Purrel minigames). I was a fan of both Videomancer's video work and music under the name Happy Birthday Mr. Baskets and thought it’d be a dream to work together on this!

Tell me about the process of getting the video made, and feel free to get as in-depth as you'd like. When did you figure out an interactive version would be part of the package?

We went back and forth a bunch discussing the direction and parameters of the video. I had initially sent her green screen performance footage and she began crafting the environment first as well as making the model of me. It was really exciting to see elements come to life through her interpretations of my influences. The interactive version came about as she was editing the video and wanted to be able to edit on the fly, as one might do for live TV. It made sense to make that available for anyone to play with, so it's essentially a public version of the tool she made and used for the final cut!

How does it feel to witness an animated version of yourself? Did you plan your styling/costuming so it would translate well to becoming a video game avatar of sorts?

It feels pretty crazy! Especially in a style that has a lot of meaning to me. It somehow reflects a part of me that my human form doesn't capture visually, kind of like a sona or something. So I'm really grateful to Videomancer for collaborating with me on this and give me the opportunity to see myself in this way. The track is meant to be really bouncy and she nailed the energy and spirit of the song with her animations of my cat and myself. To be honest, I didn’t really plan my styling for an avatar at all, but she did an amazing job translating my outfit!

Was there anything that came from the video production process that was surprising or unexpected?

Sorry if this is a non-answer, but I suppose the whole video was surprising! I had an idea for what to expect but was completely floored when I saw the first clips she sent me.

From your IG I see you have an adorable cat who provided inspiration for the video. I love cats...so much...so please consider this a free space to gush about your cat / share anything special about them 🐱

I thought you'd never ask! My cat’s name is Coco and he loves to play, sing (“hewwooOoOOOo!”), and eat treats like Churus and dried chicken. I'm convinced that he was a person in a previous life and has some memories of that. He's always commenting on what I'm doing around the apartment. I’ve taught him a bunch of tricks; he can sit, shake his left and right paws, lay down, roll over, and jump on/off surfaces or through a loop I make with my arm. He’s also good at annoying me, particularly by licking my face in the middle of the night. That's what this song is about. We play a lot and yet he’s always vying for attention, choosing to be mischievous as soon as I’ve reached a creative flow state. We’re in tune like that. I want to get him a kitten to hang out with once I can afford one, he’s very social and I think that would help him get some extra energy out.

Thank you Cocojoey! Listen to STARS, the album whence "MIDNIGHT LICKING HOURS" came, here.

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