Music Makers

behind the music video with Lou Salome ("Enemies To Lovers")

Here at I Enjoy Music, we love music videos. If a song is a fantasy of sorts, a music video makes the fantasy real...d'ya know what I mean?

Today we are going Behind The Music video with a very special duo: Lou Salome, the pairing of actor Jack Kilmer and director Leah Hennessey, named for the French psychoanalyst and associate of chill pals like Nietzsche and Freud. The music is as heady as the band name; "Faith" is a blurry sigh of a debut single, and follow-up "Your Eyes Immaculate" pairs passionate vocals with potent rock chordage that drifts to the ceiling like incense smoke.

Now we have "Enemies To Lovers," a delightful flirtation ("I wanna be that bitch / The one you can't quit") flavored with early '10s blog rock spice, and simmered in an early '00s rock revival broth.

In a world of blank, dull people with shrimpish neck posture from looking at their phones all the time, this song transports me to the delicious indecency of getting a little libidinal in THE REAL WORLD. Specifically it reminds me of bumming cigarettes I didn't even want to smoke, just so I could keep hanging out with a dirtbag crush. I forgot my coat! I'm freezing! My throat hurts! But it's worth it!

And "Enemies To Lovers" has the perfect low-budge, high-impact music video, with Kilmer and Hennessey preening, tussling, and cavorting—truly there's not a more applicable situation for the word cavorting—beneath a cozy canopy, demonstrating the essential chemistry of the song in real time. Romance is not dead, it's just hiding in bed.

I sent Hennessey and Kilmer some questions about the video...below...answers:

First, I would love to hear about the full production process from start to finish! Get as in-depth as you'd like. Who directed it / edited it? What was the shoot like?

Jack Kilmer: I remember as we were writing a treatment for this really elaborate video that required a huge budget and film crew I turned to Leah and said wouldn’t it be great if we could shoot this from bed. And she responded with let’s just do that. Because that is how we feel right now.

Leah Hennessey: We made this video as a recreation of the album cover, which was also Photobooth. I’m a filmmaker and obviously I love working with a team but for this project it always feels more true to the mission to keep it as intimate as possible, so it was very much just us.

How do you feel the visuals connect with the song? / was there anything in particular about the song that you wanted to emphasize with the video?

JK: For me it’s the sense of humor. I hope people see our process with songwriting and the perversity that is throughout it.

LH: I love the trope of Enemies to Lovers—from the classic Pride and Prejudice kind of story to the Dramione novel length fan fictions—and I love when people film really sincere cosplay scenes in their bedrooms. I’m obsessed with this band like a fan so I love feeling like I’m making some deeply creepy fan media for Lou Salome.

You met in an acting class—were you approaching this video like you were acting and playing specific roles? Or was shooting this together a more naturalistic / instinctive type of thing, rather than something more formal like 'performing a scene'?

JK: I try to keep everything very instinctual with music so if it feels good it is probably alright. Once the story popped up we ran with it and tried to lean into the Lovers quarreling/ toxicity of it. We wrote that song before we ever started hanging out which is interesting. Leah originally was singing the whole time but I did the first verse as scratch vocals on the demo and we just kept that take and then it became this duet which supported the lyrics even more.

LH: It’s all acting. It’s all pretending to be Leah and Jack from Lou Salome.

This song feels quite romantic to me, from the dreamy fuzzy guitar sound to the vocal delivery to the lyrics themselves. And the video is romantic too...is romance back? Should we all be trying to be more romantic? If so, how can unromantic people bring more romance into their lives?

JK: David Duchovny did this show called The Red Shoe Diaries. Also there’s this movie called Body Heat. It’s been my dream the last 5 years to bring that aesthetic come-back. Martinis and smokey jazz bars and Armani suits and of course romance is the key. I don’t know if our song is tapping into that but it's just a dream.

LH: I think romance, like reading, is becoming an obsolete technology. There’s a massive surge in codifying and fetishizing the mechanics of romance as we live through its death pangs. Romance has always changed based on the cultural context, and pretty soon our romantic traditions will seem as archaic as medieval courtly love. That’s tragic and liberating. I think Lou Salome takes kind of an accelerationist approach to that process but I’m very impressed by people who are imagining actually new ways to love.

Lastly...do you have a favorite music video, or favorites?

JK: The "Stay Together For The Kids" blink-182 video was very intense when it came on, seeing all those punk kids rioting. I remember noticing they had a real budget for videos. It was like seeing my favorite band in a movie. My older sister told me it was about divorce which I still think about when the song comes on. Sad really.

LH: I once got in a big fight with someone I was dating because I said I liked music videos more than music, the logic being that a good music video transcends and includes the music. He accused me of being contrarian, the assumption being that music videos are a trash medium. I stand by the potential for music videos to achieve Gesamtskuntswerk status, but I am also a rock musical apologist.

I love really simple videos like this Helium video