Haim Debuts New Music Video for “Lost Track”
Haim and filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson have collaborated yet again, this time for an exclusive new Haim music video for the band’s song “Lost Track.” Shot on location in Southern California as part of a W magazine cover shoot, directed and photographed by Anderson and starring Alana Haim, the video features “The Balboa Ladies Society” at the Annual Balboa Gold Rush and Fashion Bazaar, a concept formulated by Anderson for W’s annual Directors Issue.
Inspired by San Fernando Valley women and their social club activities in the 1950s—flower shows, wedding showers, and charity fashion shows—Anderson placed the Haim sisters smack dab in the middle of this ’50s set in the Balboa Golf Course’s restaurant at a banquet club called Monterey at Encino. Sisters Alana, Danielle, and Este Haim perform “Lost Track” as members of this fictional society of ladies who lunch, flanked by friends and family members of the director.
This particular collaboration, of course, comes from the longstanding history that Anderson has with Haim. The story goes that Alana’s mother, Donna Haim, was actually the filmmaker’s art teacher in elementary school. According to the director, back in the day Donna looked almost identical to what Alana looks like now, and some decades later, when Anderson first heard a Haim song on the radio, it led him to look into the three singing sisters and their background. When he realized he knew their mom, he reached out to form a friendship and eventually direct one of their music videos. The collaboration led to more music videos, and of course, the decision to cast Alana in her debut film role in Licorice Pizza as Alana Kane, the aimless 25-year-old counterpart to Cooper Hoffman’s Gary Valentine, a former child actor turned wannabe entrepreneur in the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s.
The magazine shoot and subsequent music video for “Lost Track” was a family affair, and not just for the Haims, who are joined here by their mother, but also for Anderson and his partner Maya Rudolph, whose eldest daughter Pearl Anderson can be seen in the shoot for W’s Directors Issue and Haim’s music video (the 16-year-old also appears briefly in Licorice Pizza). Those familiar with Licorice Pizza will recognize in the music video for “Lost Track” that same visual texture, fluidity, and running sequences that memorialized the film in the hearts of the director’s fans and viewers, and led to three Oscar nominations.
