Capital Cities – Safe and Sound
2013 · Directed by Grady Hall
6M Likes
Best comments
1.“We have to protect this song at all costs, before TikTok finds it.”
More comments
- 2.“The dumbest wish as a kid was to be grown up.”
- 3.“I'm 58 and probably one of the oldest watching this, but I remember hearing this song coming from my son's room when he was a teenager. He's on his own now... and I miss those days.”
The story
This is a dance history class disguised as a party. Director Grady Hall shot it inside the Los Angeles Theatre, an old downtown movie palace. The duo plays on stage while dancers step right out of the pictures on the walls – 1940s swing, 1970s roller disco, 1990s hip-hop – and film clips from the theater's past come alive and challenge each other to dance-offs. Every decade gets its turn under the lights.
Funny thing: the song was already old news to the band. Capital Cities first put it out in 2011 on their debut EP, and the trumpet line everybody remembers only showed up after eight earlier takes. When it finally broke in 2013 it went huge – number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, number one in Germany and on US alternative radio, and more than two million copies sold in the US by early 2014.
The video won Best Visual Effects at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards and picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Music Video. A feel-good song about riding out the storm together, set to eighty years of people who refused to stop dancing. Fits.
