Music Makers

I ENJOY MUSIC VIDEO PREMIERE: Tod Lippy - "The Ache"

A new premiere on I Enjoy Music (and I Enjoy Music Videos) awaits, and it rips. Walk with me...

...a while back, I interviewed the filmmaker Kyle Garrett about the video he did for Car Colors, the current musical identity of Charles Bissell of The Wrens...

...and now I have the pleasure of premiering the video he made for the Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and musician Tod Lippy. The song is called "The Ache" and it's a stirring, atmospheric, dare I say cinematic rock song (I do dare to say it is cinematic! some things simply are cinematic and you're just gonna have to deal with it baby) off Lippy's latest album, WORST ENEMY, which came out in March. When I say Lippy is a multimedia artist, I mean it—we're talking painting, photography, curation, books, magazines, critical writing...always amazing to encounter someone who moves through the world with such creativity.

Here is the video for Tod Lippy's "The Ache" seen here for the first time ever [and it's also in the top slot of the I Enjoy Music Videos channel]:

I feel like I haven't seen this stunning style of collage-ish animation in a music video...ever? It's so unique. The archival footage gives it a familiar, nostalgic feeling, but the cosmic animation takes it to the SUBLIME. It's a beautiful visual accompaniment to the song.

When asked about the backstory to "The Ache," Lippy wrote, "Well, I pretty much won the lottery where relationships are concerned, and over the past three-and-a-half decades of being with my partner, I’ve come to recognize that such a deep and abiding romantic love for someone is always shadowed by the anxiety of having to imagine life without them. 'The Ache' is not the first song I’ve written on this topic, but I think it’s the one with the most visceral take on it. I originally wrote a demo of it for a multidisciplinary project called GULFF with the British composer and sound artist Owain Kelly, and a very stripped-down (and much darker) version of the song actually appears on our first album, due out in September. But I also sent the demo to Bryce Goggin, who produced my last LP, and I ended up having the pleasure of working with him again in the studio to record this version, with Chris Heinz on drums and Richard Steele on guitar."

What was it like working with Garrett, with whom he's collaborated on several videos already? "Kyle is the bomb!" Lippy responded. "First and foremost, he’s a true artist—I’m always blown away by the beauty and depth of his work (for my projects and for others). He’s always enthusiastic, always game, and, most important, always able to take any idea, however crazy, and run with it. In this case, I really wanted him to create a video for the song without giving him any particular notes. I knew whatever angle he took would be phenomenal, and what he came up after months of intense effort is so beautiful and resonant. It really brings the song and its subject matter to another level."

NEXT: I got to ask Kyle Garrett a few questions about how the video got made, including the unexpected amount of time it took, how limitations can help free you to be more creative, and what it means to edit like Steph Curry...in a jiffy...the interview...

[Molly Mary O'Brien] Working with Tod, what was the initial directive for the video, and was there any particular inspiration/moodboard for it? What about the song inspired this particular visual approach?

[Kyle Garrett] Tod and I had made four music videos prior to "The Ache," so by then our chats were pretty informal. He just texted me one day with a Dropbox link to the song and the words "Let's talk." That's a cool way to start a day. And there wasn't really a directive for the video, initially. We talked on the phone a couple times and I mentioned how the song was kind of giving me a light whirlwind vibe, almost like when some leaves get swept up and swirled around in Fall. And he was talking about swaying trees and some footage of them that he'd been filming, I felt like we were basically on the same page. I'd been really into Alice Isaac's work and mentioned her to Tod, saying maybe we could try something collage-y and/or kaleidoscopic, with movement that felt evocative to the song. But I don't have that same design expertise and precision so it would also need to be a bit less exacting, I thought. But that was in October 2025, and I finished in May 2026, so I think that last part ended up not being true, haha.

Walk me through your process for making this video—feel free to get as technical as you want, I do not mind the nitty gritty.

Yes! My wife will be really glad that finally somebody else gets to hear me half-brag and half-complain about how fucking hard this was to make! The process, after evolving a bit from some early Winston Hacking-esque approaches, ended up being, basically, rotoscoped public domain footage, as well as public space imagery from NASA, used to create moving collages. The challenge with that is that, usually public domain stuff is really low-resolution, although amazing (thank you Prelinger Archive!), so a lot of the rotoscoping is truly a frame-by-frame process to make it look halfway decent. This video is 5,400 frames give or take. And a lot of shots have several rotoscoped elements.

I was also using this After Effects plugin called "Pastiche" and another one called "Newton 4" to turn the NASA images into thousands of moving shapes with their own specific gravity and motion. It was a genuinely maddening process that was yielding stuff that I thought was so different and interesting that it usually ended up being worth the time. Like, it was mostly in the beginning that I'd have to scrap things I'd try. After a while I could kind of map it out if I had a good idea of where I wanted to end up. Some shots are tens if not hundreds of thousands of layers, all composited on top of one another. You mess up constantly and have to re-work stuff. I had to be extremely organized with my file naming, color-coding, frame-measuring. Wild, wild shit. I'll never do it again, and I'm sure Tod will never work with me again—he wanted this video originally in December 2025, LOL. But I hope he took the effort to mean that I really resonate with his song, because I do. I think it's really beautiful.

I'm struck by the fluid motion and transitions throughout, which are beautiful and seem like they take a lot of planning to execute. Any secrets or tricks for creating this kind of lovely flow?

Gosh, thank you, that's so cool to hear! A lot of it was kind of like a visual version of word association (image association?). The first thing I did was download as many public domain movies as I could find, and then comb through them for scenes or shots that I thought felt relevant to the themes of the song. And then after the visual language of the piece was established, I'd pick a shot that I knew I absolutely wanted to have, and I'd think through how to recontextualize it.

For instance, I knew I wanted to use this great shot of a diver bouncing on a diving board and then diving into a lake, but I wanted to isolate the diver by rotoscoping her and putting her...somewhere else. So then I'd go back through the rest of the footage and see what might make sense. In that particular case, it was putting her on top of a make-up compact. It created this fun dynamic where suddenly she was miniaturized. And that led to remembering another shot of this teenage girl drinking a soda and flirting with (a very young) Dick York—"what if the diver splashed into the soda??"

I'm a huge Golden State Warriors fan, and sometimes on the local broadcast, when Steph Curry does something spectacular, the color commentator will say, "His mind is free." I would think about that sometimes. I tried to keep my mind free and let ideas come to me. So once the ideas solidified, I definitely had to plan it out, but to get to that stage of just executing the idea would take a lot of iterating and thinking. Did I just compare myself to Steph Curry? I hate myself. [ed. note—MORE artists should be comparing themselves to great sports players.] But these are the things that go on in my head.

As far as secrets or tricks—I think that leaning into the limitations of your skillset, or even visual rules that your project has established, is really helpful. If anything goes, it's too overwhelming. So going through the pain of making some terrible mistakes and decisions up front to figure out what you do and don't want is helpful and frees you up to be creative. I knew I could only use public domain film clips and stuff from Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope for my assets. That's a great restriction once you accept it. Seeing how the pieces can fit together is so hard with idea pollution.

Any shots / moments in this that you are particularly proud of, or that took a particularly large amount of work to complete?

Yes, I love what I call the "Flower Tower" sequence, where different colored flowers extend and bloom into the sky while tiny people and cartoons dance on top of them. I have to thank my wife, Ashley, for the idea to incorporate the old cartoons. She was really instrumental in giving me feedback and making me feel like this was worth it, especially in the darker moments where I thought it wasn't working or where the idea of finishing it felt overwhelming. I thought about her all the time while I worked on it.

And I love the man playing the violin inside the moon while shooting stars fly through the screen.

What's cool about the violin player is that he is from one of the first ever sympathetic portrayals of gay men in cinema—a movie called Anders als die Andern from 1919. Using public domain footage really limits how diverse you can be, because all of this stuff was extraordinarily white and heterosexual. I was really happy to include something like that. I was also very proud of the black hole stuff—that took forever to create.

This video took you 6 months to finish, and I figure you were also probably working on other stuff in the meantime and juggling a lot (or that's my assumption as a freelance/self-employed creative worker in a different zone!). Is it hard to marinate on work like this for so long, or is there a creative advantage to taking your time? Also how does it feel for it to finally be making it out into the world?

Oh yeah, there were several pauses throughout to jump into other bread-and-butter work, and I also shot and completed another music video for an amazing band here in Oakland called Twin Bloom during this time. I have really mixed feelings about the amount of time this took, to be perfectly honest. I'm really proud of it, but I feel bad that it wasn't complete in time for the initial release of Tod's song, and part of me worries that my finished work is underwhelming compared to the big game I talk about how tough it was to make. I definitely lost my train of thought every time I paused, and there was a necessary ramping up to get back into the groove of this particular workflow.

I will say that once Tod said something to the effect it's all good, take your time, that was freeing and I stopped putting pressure on myself to be fast. Moving fast was not possible with this. Sometimes it would take days just to rotoscope a few seconds of footage, or to figure out how to make 10,000 star shapes for a water ski wake. Time was an advantage to do those things to the best of my abilities, which are admittedly limited. I'm so happy I did it, and I will never do it again, if that makes sense. Ashley, my lovely, patient, supportive wife, will be glad to hear that. And I hope people dig it—it's an amazing feeling having it out in the world and I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to premiere it here.

Thank you Kyle and Tod! WORST ENEMY is here: