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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