How else do you tell someone you love them besides immortalizing them in song? You stick the landing by making a muppet in their likeness and then produce a music video that encapsulates both and ensures your love will live on forever and be shared with thousands of people on the internet. It’s hard to believe that this still needs to be explained to people in 2020 but it still needs to be said. Kermit the Frog released “Rainbow Connection” 41 years ago.
Fortunately, East Coast Roots/Soul artist Chris Kirby is fluent in this love language. His latest single—“Victoria”—exemplifies such grand gestures. Kirby explains that the acoustic-driven Roots/Soul number was musically-inspired by Bill Withers, lyrically-inspired by his wife Victoria, and the video, as you might have assumed, was inspired by the Muppets.
The song, which is the third single to be released off of Kirby’s 2019 album What Goes Around, was the result of a co-write that brought fellow Newfoundlander Kirk Penney in for reinforcements.
After all, a muppet-themed love song is not the sort of thing you engage in lightly. You’re generally going to want to feel out the overall concept with a few of your musical pals.
“At the time Victoria and I were just starting out”, Kirby explains. “I feared it might be a bit presumptuous to write such an assured love song at that point, but we did eventually get married so perhaps the song could be considered foreshadowing!”
And because no one would expect you to grow your own roses either, Kirby enlisted puppeteer Jake Thompson to create the video. The all-puppet production was filmed and produced in St. John’s, NL by Centre City Media and Film Production.
We’re going googly-eyed over it.