Video: Meg Myers, ‘Numb’

Kevin Bronson on May 23rd, 2018

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Maybe standing in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and screaming “Leave me alone!!!” would have sufficed.

Instead, Meg Myers’ wrote and released the single “Numb,” an incendiary four minutes of seething vocals and hurricane-force power chords to articulate how she felt cornered and helpless in Stage 1 of her career, as her corporate handlers tried to control her every move. “I was frustrated and it came through in this song,” Myers says. “I discovered that this feeling was something I’ve experienced my whole life and decided to look within and confront it. I wanted the video to make the viewer experience this uncomfortable feeling.”

Mission accomplished. Director Clara Aranovich’s squirm-inducing video features Myers in an office environment as co-workers invade her personal space. It makes you want to run into the middle of the street and shout “Leave me alone!!!”

“In ‘Numb,’ I interpret Meg’s sentiment as one of desperate pleading for space, for room to exist quietly and at her own pace in a culture that insists on so much of her and for her as a female,” Aranovich says. “As I listened to the track on repeat I just couldn’t wrest my thoughts from a dance piece by Pina Bausch in which a woman is continually touched and measured by a mass of men in suits. So I decided to write an homage narrative that expands from Bausch’s conceit but that turns away from a purely gender-based backbone to a broader, societal one.”

The tune is the first single from Myers’ second album, “Take Me to the Disco,” out July 20.

||| Watch: The video for “Numb”