O’Reilly & Vincent are Irish & English acoustic duo Finn O’Reilly and Rod Vincent who are set to release their debut album Clearance Sale later this year. Taken from the album, Anna and the Apple follows the duo’s debut single Men & Books, which picked up many plays on Amazing Radio and various BBC regional stations.
The song is set on an apple farm in Australia although Rod tells us due to budgets, they decided to shoot the video in Catalonia, Southern Spain last summer. Despite being shot on the other side of the earth from where the song is set, they do manage to feature an emu and a wallaby!
Anna and the Apple tells the story of Anna, who was “picking apples on the farm” and “spent her afternoons on Ripple Bay”, and the hapless singer still yearning for her after she has moved on “to Laos or Cambodia.” It’s a tale of obsessive infatuation, the sort of holiday romance that has to end but leaves an indelible mark. The lover pines about how he “needed her first thing in the morning, to see the endless sky sloping down to where the fishing boats put out their lights.” But “Anna had no weaknesses, no need”, and in the end she is a free-spirit who would inevitably fly off to new adventures.
The melody bounces along to a gentle surf-rock beat with a skiffle bassline and a haunting guitar solo. It builds to a pulsing bridge to express the singer’s self-indulgent sense of loss when Anna would “steal into the apple fields of the morning”.
Finn’s favourite song from his favourite band, The Grateful Dead, is Ripple. This made it a moment of serendipity when he found the lyric about “Ripple Bay” that Rod wrote years before he met Finn or heard The Grateful Dead’s music.
https://www.oreillyandvincent.com/