Video: Send Medicine, ‘Second Biggest Fan’

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Send Medicine

The pandemic fouled the 2020 album release plans of L.A. psychedelic rockers Send Medicine, but was powerless to stop their creative juices from flowing. The band, fronted by native Canadian Julian Hacquebard, had planned to issue the follow-up to 2018’s “Mermaids on the Verandah” this fall, instead deciding to write and record.

As a result, Send Medicine now has two albums of kaleidoscopic folk-rock waiting in the wings, although, as Hacquebard points out, they “sound worlds apart from each other.” One was made in 2019; the other was conceived initially on a piano in lockdown after the frontman returned from a trip to India on March 15. “Slowly we’ve been building this new record slowly and delicately, and trying to call in some strange creative ‘other’ entities into our space,” he says. “Letting the songs steer the direction of the record, rather than the other way around.”

To tide their growing fanbase over, two weeks ago Send Medicine released “Second Biggest Fan” (b/w “High in the Rain,” which features backing vocals by Lauren Ruth Ward). Hacquebard says “Second Biggest Fan” is from the 2019 sessions, “but made the cut for songs that seem to be able to swim in the waters of 2020.”

As surreal as the tale of 2020 has been, the new Hacquebard-directed video for “Second Biggest Fan” spins an even weirder narrative. Here’s how he explains it: A woman (played by his sister-in-law) experiences some kind of dark night of the soul cycle, which begins in water and ends in earth (or her own mind) and along the journey has a relationship with a strange entity that transmutes eventually into two entities,  archetypes, possibly some form of her astral guides.

“We shot the video with my sister-in-law over a period of a few days,” Hacquebard says. “She was never supposed to be in the video. She had to step in last-minute, when a scheduling conflict came up with the original lead. She said afterwards that acting in the video was like a therapy session, and presented her with an immediate avenue to channel all her own inner frustrations and chaos and isolation that has obviously been amplified for everyone in 2020. In essence. she became the video.”

||| Watch: The video for “Second Biggest Fan”

||| Previously: “Scorpio Long Ago,” “Harvest Man,” “Corduroy,” “She Believes in the Devil”