Walk off the Earth – Little Boxes
2012 · Directed by Sean Wainsteim
130K Likes
Best comments
1.“My sister was singing this at breakfast: 'There's a pink one, and a green one, and a gay one, and a yellow one.' I swear I choked on my juice.”
More comments
- 2.“Beard guy is like: 'Step away from my dollhouse.'”
- 3.“This song was written by Malvina Reynolds, a musician and political activist born in 1900. She wrote it at 62, in response to the striking sight of the little boxes of Daly City, outside San Francisco.”
The story
Malvina Reynolds wrote Little Boxes in 1962, inspired by the postwar tract houses going up in Daly City, California. Her friend Pete Seeger cut it first in 1963, and it became the only single of his that ever charted. It's a folk song that pokes fun at suburban sameness: matching houses, matching jobs, matching people. Showtime's Weeds later used it as its opening theme from 2005 to 2012, with a different cover version nearly every season.
Walk off the Earth took the title literally. The Burlington, Ontario band built a whole room out of cardboard and played the song on instruments made from boxes. It went up in March 2012, just weeks after their five-people-on-one-guitar cover of Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know had blown past 175 million views. Everybody was waiting for the follow-up. The follow-up was arts and crafts.
Sean Wainsteim directed it, and it earned a Juno nomination for Video of the Year in 2013 (up against Of Monsters and Men's Little Talks, which is also in the Weirdness). A protest song about cookie-cutter living, played on literal boxes by a band that got famous for refusing to play anything the normal way. Hard to call yourself a conformist when your drum kit is a shipping carton.
