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Issy Wood is not shy about discussing the often hush-hush side of being an artist: the business of it. The London-based and Durham, North Carolina–born painter and techno-pop musician has gone on the record to explain why she chose the Michael Werner Gallery (over the better-known Gagosian), and why she released her last album independently after parting ways with Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records—an imprint of Sony Music. For up-and-coming artists, her openness surrounding the friction she experienced finding the right distributors for her art is inspiring—it also just so happened to be the jumping-off point to her second album. A music video, handmade, conceived, and directed by Emily Schubert, for the single “Back Burner” from Wood’s next album is released here.
“The song is based on an idiom, when we say something’s ‘on the back burner,’ meaning it’s not a priority,” Wood says. “This was a feeling I had about myself and the way I was treated by the people I worked with when I was signed to a music label, and how angry and embarrassed it made me. The song tries to make a joke out of white-hot rage.”
Wood, who considers visual art her day job (her velvety paintings of everyday objects play with themes of foreignness and familiarity), spends her nights making music. “I’m making what I think is pop music, but people describe it as wonky,” she told The New York Times in 2022. For her, the two mediums are only tangentially related, but, she says, “people who aren’t as close to the process of making it all might disagree.”
In the video for the song, her actual art appears alongside dancing puppets captured in stop-motion. It’s a video that is painstakingly made by Emily Schubert. “All of my energy goes into painting and making the songs themselves, so I am always eager to hand over to someone I trust,” explains Wood of her decision to commission Schubert to bring her work to life.
Wood has a history of these collaborations. In 2022, Wood called upon her friend Lena Dunham to direct a video for her single “Both.” The resulting collab was a gorgeously melancholic video starring Hari Nef, who alternates from wounded to restless to spirited as she spends an afternoon contemplating the potential (for happiness, for disappointment) of new love.
“Back Burner” plays like a floaty collage of punchy electronic riffs set to lyrics that call for loyalty, decency, and support. It’s refreshingly not a love song. Wood’s voice dips low when she’s looking for emphasis before picking up the pace to make a point: “I need someone who only deals in fact; and when I say fact, I really mean you’ve got to have my back.”
“I felt this song of Issy’s lent itself to puppets,” said Schubert, who wears many hats (director, puppet designer, and fabricator) in her collaborations with artists like Matthew Barney, Alex Da Corte, and Josh Kline. For “Back Burner,” Schubert located puppeteers (one of whom performs every summer in Central Park) and shot the entire video between her apartment and her studio. “I have been wanting to explore the mixing of the marionette and stop-motion and shadow-puppet mediums,” she explains. “And I wanted to make multiple iterations of the same puppet. I ended up making five in total for this video: three marionette and two stop motion.”
The rooftop-at-dusk vibes of the setting and the puppets themselves are a bricolage of Barbie dolls, legos, and paintings from Wood. A handmade quality was paramount, as was the need to have the puppets move in an analogous way via puppeteers. “The song’s nature is…stubborn!” says Schubert. “Stubborn and endearing; perfect for puppets, which resist absolute control from puppeteers, and yet which are also capable of surprising gracefulness.”
Of being entrusted with the task of brining “Back Burner to life,” Schubert adds, “It’s rare for an artist to have someone make a video for their music in this way, and I am grateful to Issy for her talent, her generosity, and her faith in me and my friends to make something that would do justice to her music.”
