"Tea and Toast" Lucy Spraggan music video analysis

Act: Lucy Spraggan

Track: Tea and Toast

Genre: Pop Folk Acoustic

Year: 2012

 





Relationship between visuals and lyrics: This song is entirely a ballad telling a story about a young couple (mainly the man) and their journey in life together. The video is showing the artist sitting at a breakfast table with a load of pictures and memories and as the song progresses, it seems that each picture matches the content of the lyrics being sung at that time in the video. I think that this was used as an alternative to actually having actors act out the story for us like a short movie because that’s what the audience would expect from a song like this one. Therefore I think it was used in order to maybe surprise the audience, but also to make the song actually feel like a story so that anybody listening to it can envision the situation in their own way. This allows for the audience to use their imagination and therefore interpret the song how they want to.

Performance: During some of the video, we see the artist playing an acoustic guitar and singing the song and I think that this brings out the whole idea of the folk genre, which in my eyes is telling stories about people and relationships through song. It gives the video a very authentic and personal feeling.

Mise en scene: The setting in this video is quite normal as it is simply a regular middle class house. I think this was used because the song isn’t anything magical or supernatural, so the director didn’t want to make the video and the setting seem anything unusual. The costume is again like in many other videos of this genre just regular everyday clothing. The main props are the photos, which represent the story being told.