“Underground”

For My Movie Star, Logan Lynn broke with his usual process. By his own account he wrote 19 songs alone at the Steinway piano in his Portland loft, streamed the first writing sessions live on social media, and kept ten. A 36-second “Underground” demo from those Steinway Sessions went up on his YouTube channel in February 2017. He sent clips to Jay Mohr, the actor and comedian he credits with inspiring the album and who co-produced it, and most of the back-and-forth, Lynn said, was Mohr telling him to quiet down and be braver.

The words are Lynn’s. The music is credited to him and GLASYS, the Portland keyboardist Gil Assayas, who plays the keys. They recorded at The Hallowed Halls in Portland with Justin Phelps and Mike Blackburn engineering, and Phelps mixed and mastered it. The lyric is short and circular: someone who has fallen “so far below ground”, sullen and stuck, asking whether you will stay and hide them. When the album’s pre-order opened in July 2018, Lynn led it with a remix by the producer Rian Lewis, billed as a collaboration.

The video is cut to that remix. It is a stop-motion short by Adam Taylor, an animator and illustrator Lynn described as Laika-trained, and it went up on Lynn’s channel on 2 August 2018. Taylor told Dragonframe he heard the song as being about the pitfalls of chasing fortune and fame, and set it in the Golden Age of Hollywood with art nouveau designs. A puppet works through a series of emotional lows and climbs out of them, at one point literally, and each chorus about falling sends him down a graphic spiral that Dragonframe compared to Vertigo. Taylor had six weeks, tore each set down to build the next, and got most of the effects in camera with rear projection, on sets up to 26 feet deep.

My Movie Star came out on 12 October 2018 as a 20-track double album: Lynn’s ten songs and ten versions by other artists, among them Lewis’s remix and a cover of “Underground” by Scott Simpson. Billboard heard Lynn trading his dance-pop for a “more somber, melancholy tone”. An acoustic “Underground” followed in 2020 on the Unpeeled EP. In three years, a 36-second piano demo became an album track, a remix, a cover, a stop-motion film and an acoustic take.