Video: Belle & Sebastian – “There Is An Everlasting Song”

From How to Solve Our Human Problems (Matador, 2018).

“The video is a small tribute to the amazing people who posed, modeled and enrolled to appear in our artwork for the How To Solve Our Human Problems EP releases.”

I spent a semester at the University of Aberdeen in 1991-92. My dorm room in Dunbar Halls (demolished in 2003) had a bed, a desk, and a sink. When I first arrived at my new home I was greeted by the 70-year-old porter who spoke entirely in Scotticisms with such a thick accent that I literally could not understand a word he said and he practically had to drag me to my room. In relatively short order I would be proficient enough to not only understand what everybody was saying, but I also could tell where anybody was from. Maybe not down to the neighborhood like Henry Higgins, but the region for sure. That knowledge fades fast. These days I can’t even determine if someone’s from Ireland or Wales. But I used to.

All the people I knew from Glasgow were good looking. And I’m sure that not everybody in a Belle and Sebastian video or record cover is from Glasgow, that’s what I remember them all looking like. The band goes for a certain look. And back in 2016 they asked their fans to submit headshots to use as artwork on their upcoming series of EPs. Over 1,100 applicants submitted photos and the band ultimately selected about 50 people to shoot professionally. These were used for the artwork on the How To Solve Our Human Problems EPs.

And as a Throwback Thursday a couple weeks ago, Belle and Sebastian made this “wee video” to honor those folks. And they’re all good looking, just as I remember them being.

Belle and Sebastian: web, twitter, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.