Exclusive Video Premiere: ‘Overboard,’ The Verve Pipe

ABOVE: RORY CARROLL IN A VIDEO STILL FROM “OVERBOARD.”

After acting as the art director for classic music videos such as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Lawrence Carroll took a 15-year hiatus from the industry, and instead focused on refining his craft of photography and sculpture. Now, however, after exhibitions at renowned establishments, including the Vatican, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Carroll returns as a director with video for The Verve Pipe’s “Overboard,” which is exclusively streaming below.

Although The Verve Pipe remains widely known for their 1997 hit “The Freshman,” “Overboard” is the titular track of the band’s latest album, which was released last June. “For me, ‘Overboard’ works as a song, but it really could be anything—a movie, a novel, the first season of a TV series,” say actor Jeff Daniels, who co-wrote the song alongside the band’s frontman Brian Vander Ark. The resulting video follows Daniels’ thought, as it turns members of the band into characters, telling the story of the girl from the song, or “the girl in Michigan.”

As Vander Ark sings, “there’s a girl in Michigan / Up in Lake Superior / Who’ll never bother us again / Makin’ our lives easier,” the visuals show a distressed anonymous woman (played by Carroll’s daughter, Rory) dressed in a thin, white lace dress on the icy banks of the lake. She begins walking over frozen expanses of Lake Superior and drifting in a boat, eventually appearing on a floating piece of glacier and wading through the water, until she meets her dismal fate. Just as Carroll says, “the landscape is shrouded in an infinite haze of white light, a frozen lake that is unforgiving and formidable,” which goes hand in hand with the song’s haunting, yet beautiful storyline.

Filmed over the course of three days in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the video stays true to the song. “At one point [during filming] I got myself in that ice water up to my neck. When I saw the final video and that footage wasn’t in there, I wasn’t disappointed,” Vander Art says. “I knew why [Lawrence] took it out. The story isn’t about me.” 

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