Columbia SHARP, a male a capella group on campus, just released their first professional music video last weekend. In the video, members of the club perform arrangement “Coffee x Pillowtalk”, a song that combines Coffee by Miguel and Pillowtalk by Zayn Malik. The video produced by Kevin Chiu (SEAS ‘17) features all 12 members looking sharp (pun intended) in suits as they sing in a variety of locations, including on campus on Columbia’s College Walk.
SEAS junior and SHARP member Jeremy Grill put together the arrangement, which he came up with when arranging Coffee over the summer and realized that the line “word play turns into gun play / gun play turns into pillow talk” worked well with the popular Zayn song. Jeremy believes “the dialogue between the two songs is really interesting, because the love described in Coffee is tender and young, especially compared to Pillowtalk–which describes a love that is more raw and more sexual”.
When asked how the final product turned out when thinking about his vision of the song, Jeremy also said “The final product has exceeded my expectations in so many ways. When I was writing this arrangement, I definitely had no idea that it was going to become such a large project. One of the most exciting parts of the whole process was seeing the song become SHARP's project rather than my personal project. The whole process became a team effort in a way that amazed everyone in the group: everyone had something to bring to the table. This was especially hard because there were so many moving pieces, especially with a group of twelve. Between a trip down to Brooklyn to record the audio with our good friend and recent SHARP alumnus Danny Murcia and spending a day together where to shoot the video, we definitely spent a lot of time together–and it was really great to see everyone putting this vision ahead of their many other commitments. The process was truly a team effort, musically, creatively, and administratively, and seeing SHARP come together in this way was very exciting for everyone.”
Clearly the group and everyone else involved in production worked very hard to create this very original and quality music video, which you can enjoy here. Additionally, if you want to see SHARP perform in person, their final concert of the semester is this Tuesday, December 13 in the John Jay Lounge at 8pm.