‘Lean In’ by Beau Burnette
Exclusive video premiere of ‘Lean In’ by Beau Burnette.
‘Lean In’ is a dreamy, sun-kissed lounge track about breaking up with your phone and being present; a minimalist, beachy, cocktail-sipping electro bossa-nova song. And the accompanying music video is pure Mortal Kombat-parody green-screen kitsch, with Jesus facing off against a fake George Costanza and a slew of other bizarre characters (including a giant floating head), all played by Burnette.
“I already had the Jesus costume, and I knew I wanted to use it because I had the long hair and the beard. I thought it’d be fun to do a Beastie Boys ‘Sabotage’ kinda thing where Jesus is running around turning people into wine if they fuck up. Like, just over the slightest disagreement. No shade on Christianity or anything—it was just funny to me. Eventually, though, the video ended up evolving into this fighting-game parody with all these characters pitted against each other in combat.
“One of my friends in the business told me, ‘If you want to do a proper music video for this, it’s gonna cost like $10,000.’ I was like, ‘fuck that. I’d rather just get my own gear and learn how to do it myself.’” Beau Burnette
In addition to Christ and Costanza, there’s the golfer who smokes two packs a day, the degenerate gambler with the hardened arteries and the snakeskin blazer; the creepy dude in the yellow raincoat who’s channeling the creepy kid from Stephen King’s It; Burnette’s black-clad alter ego, and a giant floating head.
Burnette—ever the resourceful DIY videographer—purchased some second-hand camera equipment from a filmmaker buddy and a bunch of green bed sheets from Wal-Mart, stapled the sheets to walls of his studio and started experimenting with green-screen effects. The result is a pleasantly intoxicating absurdist daydream; the perfect unexpected complement to this pensive, sunkissed lounge anthem. As Burnette says in the song, “lean in.”
“There’s this Seinfeld episode where George is like, ‘Conjugal visit sex—that is happening.’ And LCD Soundsystem has the record This Is Happening. One day my friend was doing something and I said, ‘Lean into that shit. Like, do it, you know?’ It became a catchphrase for me and my friends. Say you’re deep into a bad bender—instead of being judgmental, it’s like, ‘Yeah, lean in.’”
On a deeper level, Burnette says, ‘Lean In’ is about breaking up with your phone—about being present. “Sometimes I’ll be out with my closest friends,” he says, “and even then, you look up and everyone’s on their phone. It’s weird. Of course, I’ve been guilty of it, too. I’ll find myself watching a movie, then I’ll suddenly be googling the actor, which is really pointless. The third verse of ‘Lean In’ is actually about watching Hereditary. If you’re watching that movie, and it doesn’t have your full attention, you’re really messing up. It’s like watching Apocalypse Now while playing on TikTok.”
The sessions for ‘Lean In’ were helmed by production duo Handmade Records, whose approach meshed nicely with Burnette’s aesthetic. The song’s simple, eccentric minimalism was inspired by everything from Snoop Dogg & Pharrell’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and Lil Yachty’s “Minnesota” to underground hip-hop luminary Czarface to Brian Eno.
“If you listen to ‘Drop it Like It’s Hot,’” Burnette says, “which by the way is one of Eno’s favorite songs, there’s not really a lot happening. It’s just clicks and noise. I was very much into that idea. I’ve been through my Nick Cave / Tom Waits diehard phase, but I also really like dance music. I dig the repetitiveness of it. I’m not sure I’m smart enough to fully get the band Can, but there’s something about the repetitiveness that I like. One of my old bands, Super Shaker, used to do that repetitive four-on-the-floor, sixteenths on the hi-hat kinda thing.”
Super Shaker was born from the ashes of Shaker, a fiercely independent, Mr. Bungle-obsessed Nashville noise-rock group with whom Burnette also played. Eventually, during the mid-aughts heyday of DFA Records and dance-rock bands like Franz Ferdinand, the band added a new drummer and bass player, changed its name and completely shifted its sound. Later, following the breakup of Super Shaker, Beau started rock & roll project Hot Damn Burnette, for which he was laying down Nick Cave-style narratives.
Both in conversation and in his music, there’s a refreshingly unpretentious curiosity that radiates from Burnette, Though, by his own admission, he wasn’t always so open-minded. “When I first heard Lil Yachty’s ‘Minnesota,’ I was definitely not getting it at first,” Burnette says. “Then one of my younger co-workers was like, ‘Naw, man, you’re missing the whole point. That song is fun as hell. They were just having fun in the studio.’ Finally, it clicked… like, ‘Ohhhhhhh, they’re just having fun and they’re making millions doing it. They don’t care what ‘Mr. I like Leonard Cohen’ thinks. I’m washing my David Lynch shirt right now. They don’t give a fuck what I think.
“I really don’t want to be the get-off-my-lawn guy, though I do come from an era where the mentality was—‘fuck that band. These days, though, I find it nice to not be so judgemental. I feel like that’s a big thing with newer generations—there’s not that same cynicism or knee-jerk hipster contempt for pop music. It’s a nice reminder to not take things too seriously. I try to carry that into the music I’m making now.”
Beau Burnette Instagram / YouTube / SoundCloud / Spotify
