Colbie Caillat - “ Brighter Than The Sun”

  We start off with a shot of a lovely beach house that only recording stars can afford, then we cut to Colbie standing somewhere outside and letting the sun worship her golden locks as it usually does. Cut once more to what we assume is the inside of the house, and there’s a whole lot of happy people up in here ready for a party. Hay, gurl, hay.

  But first Colbie wants to make sure she has an appropriate and pleasing theme for this little shindig so everyone can relax and enjoy themselves before that first person has had too much to drink and things go all to hell. In between bouts of twirling in the sunlight and lying artfully on a couch, Colbie explains to her posse that we gonna jack things up a bit by bringing the outside inside for a while. Everybody run get some dirt and some plants and some wine coolers!

  And of course all the folks crowded around her think it’s the best idea ever, mainly because Home Girl has top billing and they better be sweet if they want to get hired again. To get even more in the mood, a bunch of people jump up and down in that slo-mo way that means they don’t really know how to dance but they’re supposed to act like it. Then I guess a Home Depot truck pulls up outside, because suddenly the party guests have a full supply of gardening supplies at their disposal. This leads to more jumping.

  Colbie decides its time for more twirling in the sun, so she does some more of that, although she is kind enough to go sing in front of her super-excited posse every once in a while. Meanwhile, the extras who weren’t important enough for the dancing business are running around fervently, potting plants and trimming roses and rolling out sod on the coffee table. (They even use some of the sod on Colbie’s bed, which she briefly sits on and sings like she really loves it, but you know that once the camera turned away she motioned to one of her assistants that that mess better be gone by bedtime.)

  In the middle of all this fun, Colbie orders folks to do that thing where people stand in a circle and clap while some fool tries to bust some moves in the center of that circle. The first guy is all shifty, doing something not right with his shoulders, so I hope Security is keeping an eye on him. Then we have the possibly-drunken girl doing the standard water-sprinkler dance, and some more folks who just like to wear retro flannel shirts and strike poses, because any actual choreography is too tiring after you’ve lugged a bag of fertilizer.

  At the 1:06 mark, a ring of disembodied, clapping hands close in on Colbies’s head while she’s sprawled on the grassy knoll. It looks kind of creepy and I’m not sure I would order such a thing from the menu, but Colbie doesn’t seem to mind the vengeful hands at all. She probably has the right clauses in her contract to protect her at moments like this, so it’s all good.

  And that’s about the extent of it, really. People dancing, Colbie singing and shimmering, and impromptu landscaping. (They even install a lily pond at one point, because you sure won’t make the front page of the society papers without one of those.)

  Side note on that shifty guy: He keeps breaking character and looking directly at the camera instead of pretending to talk to his friends or adore Colbie. (Stop the video at 1:30: That boy is up to no good, even if he does have interesting cheekbones. He is clearly planning to take things that don’t have his name on them.)

  I guess Colbie gets a little tired out from the twirling and her unending natural beauty, so she goes in this one room where they’ve installed a swing in front of the fireplace, because apparently that’s how it looked in her dream. There must be a sign on the door explaining that this is a single-occupancy room, because her frenetic and slightly-soiled friends leave her alone while she wanders about while (what I hope are) butterflies flitter about. Oh, and there’s an orange tree in her Solitude Room as well. Gotta have one of those.

  Refreshed and spiritually-realigned, Colbie leaves the room and is immediately attacked by that vicious ring of hands again, so I guess it’s true that stars don’t have any real privacy. But she’s a trooper, and she claps along with the hands to show that she ain’t scared of people that come up in her grill and get all threateningly rhythmic.

  Meanwhile, other hands are busy all over the place, hurling wads of dirt, sculpting bushes, pruning thorny things, and shoving stems into anything where a stem can be shoved. (On the slutty-girl side of the spectrum, we do have a few possibly naughty nymphs who seem to be slightly turned on by all the stem-thrusting going on, casting smoky gazes at the few men in the room, but that kind of action is really for another type of video.)

  Eventually everyone appears to get bored with the Patty Planter routine and we stop seeing so much of that, focusing instead on the partying and revelry and the shame-potential dancing angle where folks thrust your ass into the middle of the room to see if you can come up with something remotely interesting. While you do get bonus points if your spastic maneuvers actually seem to be going along with the song, the real goal seems to be looking cute and not spilling your drink.

  And that basically takes us through the rest of the video. We do get a few more shots of Colbie strolling about in that spring meadow room like it’s an advertisement for feminine wash, and a couple of remaining gardening tasks, like actually mowing the grass in the living room, because that’s always important, but really it’s now all about the dancing and having a good time in Colbie’s Chalet de Flower Power.

  So dance we do, with everybody grinning so big their heads might snap off, limbo-lines of people snaking through the petunia pots, shifty guy still looking shifty, nobody breaking a sweat even though there are 400 people shoved into one room made to look like a place where Tazan would meet Jane, and one odd moment where Colbie seems to believe that she might be leading a church revival at a Jamaican resort.

  The song starts to fade and the happy guests start to disappear from the shots, which allows the camera to focus and linger on Colbie and her tresses as she finishes the lyrics. Then she goes to lay down on her grass bed and dream about what she can do with her house for the next party.

  Just don’t think about the nasty bugs that are probably crawling around in that sod, Colbie. They probably managed to get all of them out at the gardening center before they brought them over. Probably. Sleep well, Summer Breeze.


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Colbie Caillat - “Realize”

We start out with Colbie standing and singing in front of a wall where someone has slapped up one of those “giant pictures as wallpaper” things. This shot is of a nice forest somewhere, but I’m really not sure why we’re looking at this. Could they not afford to do any location shooting? Is Colbie scared of nature? Is there a law against filming real trees now? So many questions.

Then we cut to Colbie wandering around a house, somewhere in the actual woods that we just saw in the wallpaper, so I really don’t know what that first bit was all about. Colbie plops down at a desk and starts to both sing the song and write a letter, proving that she can multi-task and still look cute. She’s even using one of those fancy fountain pens that most people can’t use without getting the ink everywhere, so she’s got mad skills. She’s probably even writing in ancient Greek just to make us feel even less competent.

(Side note: Throughout the video, we keep getting shots of Colbie standing in front of the giant wallpaper and singing. Since they don’t bother to explain to us why she’s doing so, I’ll just ignore that whole mess. Just assume that every 20 seconds or so she’s vocalizing in the weird room for no reason.)

Colbie then decides to talk a walk, making sure to put on a cute little hat before she leaves the house in case she meets someone who wants to compliment her choices in life. She’s still singing, which is probably unsettling to nearby wildlife, but this is probably not important in the long run. Colbie comes across a sporty convertible that just happens to be parked on a dirt road, and she hops inside, because her hat will look even cuter if her hair is blowing around while she drives.

Colbie maneuvers the car along one of those curving, wooded highways that only happen in New England or some such, with the trees happily changing their leaf-colors to accent Colbie’s wardrobe. Then we cut to some guy wandering around in his city apartment, looking cute but slightly sad about something. Like Colbie, he apparently hasn’t heard of email either, and he sits down to write a letter as well. (His pen doesn’t seem to be as fancy, but he makes up for it with his carefully manicured five-o’clock shadow and good bone structure.)

Then the guy (let’s call him Brett) finishes his letter and also goes for a walk. Wherever these people live, it’s apparently very important that you get some fresh air after composing hand-written mail. Brett totters along a busy street, keeping the camera on his good side, until he locates a truck parked at the curb. He hops in and drives off, so we’ll assume that it either belongs to him or the people in this city are much more laid-back about sharing their possessions with one another than most places.

Brett drives through the city streets, which have been conveniently cleared of annoying things like pedestrians and other cars and the need to heed stoplights. After a bit, we see him leaving the city and driving along a rural road that looks shockingly familiar for some reason. (Hey, is this the street where lots of people got killed in Halloween 17: More Death and Pre-Marital Sex?)

Back to Colbie and her cute car, now driving along the streets of the city that Brett just left, then we see Colbie getting out of her car in front of his apartment building while he gets out of his in front of her rustic house in the woods, so we’ll have to assume that these two are clearly not using their communication skills effectively. We watch Colbie and her fashionable boots trot up to his door, and Brett and his insistence on jutting his jaw walk up to her portal. (All of this is interspersed with shots of Colbie playing her guitar like a Joan Baez tribute to sunshine and recreational pills.)

They both take deep breaths and knock on the respective doors. Both doors are not opened by the absent occupants. Then they both take out their letters and shove them under the doors. (Apparently these people don’t know about mailboxes and are possible victims of home-schooling.) After another Joan Baez montage, we watch Colbie jump back in her sporty car and head for the hills. Brett decides to just slump against Colbie’s door and take a nap, so he probably needs a little more purpose and direction in his life.

We wind the video down with, naturally, Colbie arriving home to find the long, tall package on her doorstep. She and her hat grin sheepishly, Brett and his facial scruff grin sheepishly, and we fade to black. And once again, I’m asking myself at the end of yet another music video: “Why can’t these people just pick up the phone?” Seriously.


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Colbie Caillat - “Bubbly”

We start off with a nice shot of the ocean, then a pleasant little shack-home nearby, and finally some shots of Colbie and her man snoozing inside the rustic dwelling. (They’re wearing matching torn jeans, so you know they’re in love.) Quick glimpses of various things about the house, like a drippy faucet, surfboards and an immodest statue with discernible genitalia. Oh my.

Whoops, it’s time to get up. The guy (who looks like his name should be Huck or something guttural like that) hops out of bed and runs off to do something, inspiring Colbie to start singing about him while wandering through the house. She’s very happy and aglow about Huck, especially when he sits in that one chair and shoves his crotch at the camera.

Colbie sings for a while, and even summons up the energy to stroke her guitar while sitting in an undefined area of the house that has odd-shaped windows. Oh wait, she’s dragged her guitar out on the front porch, so we can survey the colorful potted flowers while she sits on a homemade bench and wears flip-flops. (Side shots of Colbie and Huck giggling and dashing about on the beach during a rainstorm, proving that they are adventurous and don’t mind sudden wetness at unexpected moments.)

Now Colbie throws her guitar in a jeep and heads out. We don’t know where she’s going, but she’s still singing, so it must be a happy place of some kind. She gets to wherever, and then proceeds to start marching through a field of wheat or something. Then she gets tired and decides to plop down in the middle of the waving grains for a quick rest. While rejuvenating, Colbie has flashbacks of her and Huck apparently wandering around this same field, with Colbie sporting a startling handkerchief on her head and channeling 1973.

Colbie finally gets moving again, and decides to walk along a cliff next to the seashore, which is exactly what you want to do when wearing flip-flops and not paying attention to where you’re going because you’re too busy singing and grinning about what Huck can do to your toes. We have more flashbacks, with Huck showing that he can do other things to Colbie that make her want to write lyrics and eat granola.

Then Colbie is back in the jeep, driving and recalling additional Huck moments, like the time they both smiled at something a cow did while they drove past. They pull up to the beach, and since the sun is lowering in the sky, it’s obviously time to head out on that beach where all their happy friends are gathered around a campfire. But before we can find out what’s for dinner, we see Colbie back in her house and in the back of her jeep, banging on that guitar. (Seriously, were they unable to find a single camera angle where the sun didn’t light up Colbie’s golden tresses like she’s Madonna With Guitar?)

Anyway, we head back to the campfire gang, where Colbie and Huck are kind of hogging the spotlight with their cuteness, but I guess that’s okay since this is Colbie’s song and all. And that pretty much wraps it up. We get a few more images of sun-dappled Colbie in acoustic settings, Colbie wandering around her quaint love shack in search of other reminders of how Huck makes her effervescent, and finally the two of them hop back into the jeep and drive off to make pretty babies named Bean Sprout and Tofu…



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