Emma Stone Delivers Madcap Dance in Will Butler’s ‘Anna’
Emma Stone dances through the famed Queen Mary ship in the beautifully stylized clip for Will Butler‘s “Anna,” the second single off the Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist’s debut solo LP, Policy.
Directed by Brantley Gutierrez and choreographed by Ryan Heffington (who handled the dancing in Sia’s “Chandelier,” and the recent reboot of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s “Say Say Say”), the video boasts the aesthetic and madcap feel of classic musicals (imagine Wes Anderson directing Cole Porter’s Anything Goes). Stone saunters unassumingly through the ship’s corridors at first, but as the funked-out, horn-laden grooves of “Anna” drive ahead, she and the crew’s moves grow more deliberate and outrageous.
As Butler repeats the final word of the line “Cause you got to get money!” Stone dashes wildly down another hall, grabbing stacks of cash being thrust out by perfectly timed jazz hands. Moments later, she’s bashing out a solo on an invisible piano, twisting and shouting on the ship’s deck and bringing the wild festivities to a close with an absurdly glamorous and silly stage show.
Butler released Policy in March, describing the album in a statement as “American music — in the tradition of the Violent Femmes, the Breeders, the Modern Lovers, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, the Magnetic Fields, Ghostface Killah. And John Lennon (which counts).”
To help promote the LP, Butler teamed up with The Guardian for an unusual musical project in which he wrote and recorded five new tracks based on news headlines. The results included “Clean Monday,” about the struggling Greek economy, “Waving Flags” about Ukrainian separatists,” You Must Be Kidding” about a Sao Paulo water crisis, “Madonna Can’t Save Me Now,” which was inspired by a black hole and “Waters of Babylon” about ISIS members destroying museum artifacts in Mosul, Iraq.
As for Arcade Fire, the band recently released the deluxe digital edition of their 2013 album, Reflektor, which includes six new bonus tracks. A limited edition cassette version — aptly dubbed The Reflektor Tapes, like the band’s new documentary — arrives October 16th.