Danish singer Nanna Fabricius, who writes and records as Oh Land, always knew she wanted to work with filmmaker Kristian Levring, who was part of the avant-garde Dogme 95 movement. So when he agreed to work on a video of hers, she was more than happy to let him pick the song.
The track Levring chose was a delicate, melancholy ode to wisdom and age called "Love You Better," from Oh Land's 2013 album Wishbone. "It is a song that means a lot to me," Fabricius says in an email to NPR Music. "It was written in the L.A. sun on an afternoon with my friend David Poe. We were talking about how you sometimes know that you would be better at love if only you were older. But you can't rush old. You have to be young and dumb and let time do its thing before you get the experience you need to handle love right."
In Levring's video, Oh Land appears to age slowly in reverse in a surprising, and sometimes unsettling, series of subtle fades. "I will wrap my arms around you and keep you from the cold," she sings. "I will love you better when I'm old."
"The video was shoot was fun and challenging because it's sorta shot like stop-motion," Fabricius says. "We gradually remove prosthetics and makeup for me to get younger and younger. I was wearing 3D tracking dots for the animators to make the transitions seamless. It was 95 percent [of the] time in makeup, and the rest was shooting."
Oh Land's most recent album is 2014's Earth Sick. She's currently at work on a follow-up.
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