About this episode
For Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad, how a song looks is as important as how it sounds. And her latest album Death of a Cheerleader looks and sounds red. Pom Pom Squad’s video for “ Head Cheerleader ” is fantastic. (The song itself is amazing and one of my favorites of 2021.) It’s rife with colors, images, and symbols. But what Berrin did with the video is not surprising if you know her background: she first moved to New York to study acting at NYU. And while the video is awash in vivid colors, red stands out. That color played a big part of the songwriting process for Death of a Cheerleader . In fact, she surrounded herself with it during recording, “Lots of red velvet and red vinyl. I had red curtains and wore red gloves,” Berrin says. It was important for her to carve out a physical space during writing that “looked like the internal space of the record. And red is what I wanted the world of the record to look like.” Berrin cites John Waters and David Lynch as influences in the making of her videos, which she says are heavily stylized representations of the world.