Hollow River
We’re excited to be speaking today with acclaimed Pop-Punk Rapper and multiinstrumentalist extraordinaire Mark MacDonald who is best known throughout the world by his far-famed nom de plume Hollow River; greetings and salutations, Mark! Before we dive into the Q&A mosh-pit, how has the freshly-minted autumn of 2023 been treating you? Autumn has been great! This is my favourite time of year - its perfect sweater weather outside. I tend to find the summer a bit too hot so spring and fall is when I thrive. I also just got back home for Canadian Thanksgiving so that got me into the spirit of the season. Congratulations on the recent release of your newest single and music video Loved Me Like A Book! Starting from the top, what inspired this amazing gem of a tune? I wanted to do something lyrically different. At the time I was in a songwriting class and I was having a discussion with the teacher about how I didn’t like to write love songs. I couldn’t find a way to write something that felt like a new idea until I got the idea of using a book as a allegory one day when I was reading. It was a soft cover that I had cracked the spine
on to read easier and the pages from the middle were starting to fall out. I realized one of the things I love most about art is how you can totally fall in love with something and you get to take the best parts along with you in your everyday, which is a totally acceptable thing to do with a book but obviously a much more nuanced and sad thing when thinking about past friendships and relationships. Humanizing the book helped give depth to the narrative and the story behind the lyrics. The production of the music video for Loved Me Like A Book sounds as if it were a very hands-on affair for you! Can you talk with our ever-inquisitive readers about how the music video was shot? For sure! I had my band up to Canada for a week so that we could practice our live set (which RIPS) and we had gotten through the material faster than I was expecting to, so we took advantage of the opportunity and threw up some cameras. The whole thing took about 4 hours to film and then I edited all the footage on my Mac. Directing and editing film is not really my area of expertise but a couple google searches got me where I needed to go. Who did the producing honors on Loved Me Like A Book?
