Dan Reeder – Born a Worm
2018 · Directed by Alexis Thompson (animation)
3.1K Likes
Best comments
1.“This is my 2-year-old's favorite song. Says 'heck,' so it's OK, I guess.”
More comments
- 2.“There's a lady on TikTok who gave me a false sense of hope that this was a kids' song.”
- 3.“I raise butterflies, and this is so accurate, lol.”
The story
Dan Reeder is the kind of artist the word homemade was invented for. Born in Louisiana in 1954 and raised in California, he followed his wife to Nuremberg, Germany and stayed. He builds most of his own instruments, plays every one of them, stacks his own voice into harmonies and engineers the whole thing himself. In the early 2000s he mailed a self-made CD to John Prine, and Prine signed him to his label, Oh Boy Records. The New Yorker called him one of the foremost outsider artists in modern folk.
Born a Worm came out as a single in September 2018, and it's biology class taught by a man who can't believe what he's seeing. A worm wraps itself up, sleeps it off and comes out a butterfly, and the song's whole response is a cussing, slack-jawed shrug at the sheer nerve of nature. Two and a half minutes, nothing wasted. The video is a set of watercolors by Barbara Blackwell, brought to life by animator Alexis Thompson – soft paint for a song with a sailor's mouth. Somebody had to say it.
