Video: Charlie Hickey, ‘Ten Feet Tall’

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Charlie Hickey (Photo by Olof Grind)

Charlie Hickey’s new single “Ten Feet Tall” is an exceedingly poised song about being awkward.

The 21-year-old South Pasadena native unveiled the new song this week, along with the news that he will self-release his debut EP “Count the Stairs” on Feb. 26. “Ten Feet Tall” is the follow-up to last autumn’s single “No Good at Lying,” which, like the new track, features Phoebe Bridgers on backing vocals. The two go back to their days as teenage prodigies, when 13-year-old Hickey covered a song by then-high schooler Bridgers, and they became mutual admirers and occasional duet partners.

The six-song EP was produced by Bridgers’ collaborator Marshall Vore, who also co-wrote all but one of the tracks. Bridgers’ guitarist Harrison Whitford also plays on two songs.

As for “Ten Feet Tall,” Hickey says its origins date to when he was in school and “feeling quite alienated in this little world where everybody was instantly partying with their brand new best friends and fun came so naturally.

“I found solace in Marshall’s studio on the weekends. This was our first proper attempt at writing together and we were writing something really horrible. We were both kind of delirious and Marshall started singing the verse melody for the song as a joke, making fun of what we had been trying to write. But when I heard it, I said to him, ‘Wait, that’s the song that we’ve been trying to write.’ After that, we wrote the rest that night and recorded it the next day. We re-recorded it a few times before going back to what we did that day. I’ve never written or recorded a song like that since, and we weren’t sure it was even gonna come out, but when I hear it back, it really serves as a time capsule of a very confusing/depressing but also very fruitful and fun time in my life.”

The video for the song, directed by Zoe Donahoe and Adam Sputh, finds Hickey, Vore and Bridgers, along with Evan Wasser, Ruby Henley and Charlie’s sister, Lila Dworsky-Hickey, hanging out at the Rose Bowl and in the Arroyo Seco neighborhood. Instantly and naturally having fun, in a world where “there’s nothing that can’t be solved / With liquor, stickers and strawberry moons.”

||| Previously: “No Good at Lying,”  “Waiting Games,” “Broken,” “Odds”/”Brain Dead”