Video premiere: INSDR, ‘Hey Baby Hey’

Kevin Bronson on March 11th, 2020

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During a week-long spate of inspiration last summer, Sure Sure guitarist Charlie Glick turned his attention to his solo project, which he calls INSDR. Drawing from inspirations literary (Ursula K. Le Guin and Carl Jung), musical (Juana Molina, Chet Baker, Westerman) and experiential (his childhood in Delaware), he made an EP of stripped-down synth-pop.

Released in January, “Otherworld” is a playful mix of mini-soul songs and pop fables from a man who once had an obsession with his pocket microscope (and maybe still does). The EP’s childlike charm reveals itself on songs like “Hey Baby Hey,” which Glick says is simply “about thinking too much and missing out on the life that’s happening all around you.”

That guilelessness shines in the 2 1/2-minute fairy tale that is the “Hey Baby Hey” video, directed by Dillon Dowdell (who has helmed videos for Wallows, among others). The songwriter is innocently building a sand castle at the beach when a strange robot intervenes, destroying the castle and luring Glick into another, fanciful world. The video is a DIY affair that spares no tin foil, but its point — that opening up to the world can be as easy as (literally or figuratively) taking someone by the hand — is not lost.

Says Glick: “Sometimes you need a person, or a trans-dimensional robot, to draw you out of your head.”

||| Watch: The video for “Hey Baby Hey”