A few months ago, Minnesota’s somegirlnamedanna (that’s “some girl named Anna”) introduced herself to us with a simple song titled “Hello I Am.” On her latest release, she’s gone deeper, probing back into her childhood on “Kitchen Table,” a personal entry that looks back on her life so far.
As she told MTV News, she wrote the song while studying and working in Nashville, homesick for both her family and the younger days she’d never get back. “I started writing freely about what I missed back home, and I noticed that a lot of it surrounded my kitchen table,” she said. “I remember drawing rainbows in my notebook there even when times were hard, feeling love, telling the truth, getting caught for skipping a class and getting grounded, crying in my hands when my parents got divorced, and hugging my mom when I found out I got into college.”
Naturally, a music video for this kind of artistic statement had to be just as intensely personal. And the “Kitchen Table” clip, which premiered today (May 14), is indeed that, built around home movies and self-shot footage Anna captured while self-isolating back home in Minnesota. A lot of it takes place outside, which was a bit of a challenge to film in the 28-degree weather.
“Those were some of the memories that flashed back when I was writing the song,” she said, “and then my brother and I shot the rest of the video on the same VHS camcorder to represent a flashback of me at an older age. I wanted to get my horse in it that I grew up with because horseback riding taught me work ethic, bring back my remembrance of running in the fields barefoot, and I wanted to show people where I came from.”
There are actually two horses in the clip, as well as some dogs and cats. (In perhaps the most fitting returning-home gift ever, her dog ended up eating some of the tapes for the video.) But it’s the horses Anna took great pride in showing off.
“The sorrel horse’s name is Tate, who I nickname Tate the Great,” Anna said. “I’ve had him since I was about 15. The bay is named Jack, nicknamed Jack Attack, and I competed with him through high school. They are both former show horses and were my best friends growing up. I was most definitely a horse girl.”
As she works toward a debut release, Anna’s been keeping busy, spending time with her brother and mom and recovering from the shoot in the below-freezing weather. Her mom even had to act as on-set medic, wrapping her in blankets to warm her back up after running around barefoot. “Filming this entire video was such a memory in itself,” she said. “I now watch it back and laugh because of all the funny memories we built around the making of it and I wouldn’t want to trade that for anything.”
It’s fitting, then, that the song itself, re-playable in the same way a particularly moving journal passage is re-readable, started with that one object — the solid-oak kitchen table, which Anna and her brother carried so she could pose on it for the video shoot. “No matter what was going on in life, the kitchen table was a congregational spot where we could unify as a family, and every memory there helped make me who I am.”
Watch the charming “Kitchen Table” video above, and check it out all day all day MTV U and MTV Live.
