As a child, one of our favorite children's rhymes went, "Lizzy Borden with an axe, gave her father 40 whacks/ When she saw what she had done she gave her mother 41." From the start, it was clear that metal lay in our future.
Here's another bunch of dudes who were destined to bang heads and they're not so coincidentally named Lizzy Borden. The band has been around since 1984 and still perform a captivating blend of metal, hard rock and dramatic theater heavily influenced by Alice Cooper. Their newest video, "Under Your Skin," is a powerful clip about teenage cutting that leaves scars. Click "more" to read Lizzy's comments and watch the vid, which will debut on-air Saturday night on a special episode "Headbangers Ball," which airs from 10 p.m. to midnight on MTV2.
After our last video, "Tomorrow Never Comes," was nominated for video of the year on MTV’s "Headbangers Ball" we thought we had to step up the visuals big time on our next one.
For the "Under Your Skin" video we knew we wanted a storyline that mirrored the lyrics to the song. I wrote "skin" about the teenage phenomenon that is happening to one out of every two-hundred teenage (mostly girls), that phenomenon is called cutting.
The video for "Under Your Skin" follows the lives of three very different girls, a rich girl neglected by her parents, a cheerleader with a "nothing’s ever good enough" mother and a poor girl with an alcoholic father. The girls all have complete opposite backgrounds but share the same big secret, they all cut themselves.
In the video, Death (played by me) stalks the girls just waiting for the one who, on this occasion will cut a little too deep.
We recruited first time director Ann Potenza for the job; she understood this song completely and wrote a great treatment that we all loved right away. She then recruited director of photography Gigi Malavasi to complete the team. Joey Scott (Drummer of LB) and Ann scouted locations and hired our cast, (the rich girl in the video is my niece, Christina Farr).
We wanted something that would showcase the song and the band but with this video we got a whole lot more. My goal has always been to entertain, but if we can bring awareness to something like this, all the better. I was at a party recently talking to some girl and telling her that our new video was about cutting, she showed me the scars on her arm, that’s how common this is.
If you are or know someone that cuts themselves, check out the PSA at the end of the video; there is information that may help.
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