Not unlike the voting body for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Kate Eberstadt has had Timothée Chalamet on the brain lately. On Tuesday (Feb. 25) morning, she’s sharing an evocative music video for a sly indie-pop song titled “Timmy Chalamet.”
“I want to drink champagne with Timmy Chalamet / Alone in the church in the middle of the day / Go to confession tell him what I want to say,” sings the New York City-based artist over slinky cello strings and a laid-back, irresistible rhythm.
While we have five days to go to see if the Oscar-nominated 29-year-old pulls off a best actor win for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, the video for “Timmy Chalamet” harks back to the actor’s breakout role in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Directors Maud Oswald & Robin Giles shot “Timmy Chalamet” on film, which gives this clip the sun-soaked, idyllic look of that 2017 masterpiece, even if the imagery here is a bit more fatalistic: the infamous peach is presented here rotting with mold, while in another shot, Eberstadt immerses herself in a river, evoking John Everett Millais’ classic painting Ophelia.
“This song came out of a pretty lonely and unprecedented period of my life,” explains Eberstadt. She’d been working on an album in a cabin in Michigan when her partner, whom she lived with, broke up with her over the phone.
“I was spiraling,” she admits. “I went on a walk in the snowy woods, processing it all. My producer Jake Crocker had sent me some beats to write to. I came across this one that was a little strange, with a cowbell in it. It felt dystopian in a way that resonated with the state of my world,” she explains.
“I had recently rewatched Call Me By Your Name and was struck by Timothée Chalamet’s incredibly vulnerable and generous performance – in particular, the final scene where he’s crying by the fireplace. His heartbreak was so real, raw, palpable. I just felt like he would understand what I was going through.”
The song came to her in “a tiny little church in the woods,” and she recorded a demo back at the cabin. A few months down the road, Eberstadt and Crocker recorded “Timmy Chalamet” in person, after which composer Phillip Peterson (Lana Del Rey, Haim, St. Vincent, P!nk) “added strings to the track that really made it sparkle,” she says.
Check out the video for Kate Eberstadt’s “Timmy Chalamet” here.