Even if your mom is global superstar pop icon P!nk — especially if your mom is global superstar pop icon P!nk — you so don’t want to hear a bedtime story about how hard her life has been and all her struggles. That’s the basic Princess Bride-like premise of the singer’s new visual for “All I Know So Far,’ which dropped on Friday (May 7) like the size 57 shoe of a beanstalk-climbing giant.
The fantastical clip directed by Dave Meyers marks his 16th collaboration with the singer over a 22-year span dating back to her clip for 2000’s “There You Go.” With cameos from Cher and actress Judith Light as well as P!nk’s husband, Carey Hart, and her two kids — Willow and Jameson — the mini-movie takes viewers on a trippy journey into a fantastical world of giants, floating eyeballs and wild adventures.
It opens with P!nk and Willow hanging out in the 9-year-old’s bedroom, with an exasperated Willow huffing, “Ugh, Mom, I don’t want to hear a fairy tale! I’m not five years old anymore!” Undeterred, P!nk tells the story of another 9-year-old who thought she was all that and soooo grown up: smoking cigarettes, fighting with her mom (portrayed by Light) and fellow students, getting arrested and raging against everything.
“This is my story, it’s mine to tell/ About how I learned to break out of my cell,” P!nk says over gentle acoustic guitar. “There’s only one way you can truly live free/ It lies in the power of when I becomes me.” That preamble leads to the journey of P!nk’s rise to the top, which starts with her falling through the sky onto a cactus.
“Dave Meyers and I are back together again,” the singer said in a statement. “Since this song is sort of the story of my life and a letter to my daughter, making this video with Dave after we did our first video together 22 years ago is a really special full circle moment. He’s truly a genius and I am full of gratitude for our friendship and to experience all the times we’ve been able to work together.”
Just moments into the latest P!nk-Meyers collab, though, Willow pulls a Fred Savage and insists, “No singing!” But, as you might imagine, that does not fly for her strong-willed mama. “Felt alone, still feel afraid/ I stumbled through it anyway,” P!nk sings defiantly into her daughter’s face. And so begins her odd journey, which finds the singer stumbling through a forest of upturned bodies buried in the sand as she battles three towering pig-faced men in suits who kick her into another nightmare scenario.
After hearing about her mom surviving a literal storm of arrows, Willow is on the hook and asks what happens next, just like the initially reluctant grandson in Princess Bride. Well, Mom has to fight her way through a desert filled with floating eyeballs as dark angel Cher mouths the words to the uplifting pre-chorus, “People will pretend, but baby girl, nobody knows/ And even I can’t teach you how to fly/ But I can show you how to live like your life is on the line.”
Spitting into the wind, P!nk switches scenes again, rowing a boat to a deserted island inhabited by four men whose hair she, literally, blows off with her massive voice until she lands on one who makes her heart sing in the form of her shirtless hubby. Of course she picks him up and slams him into the ground over and over, before setting sail on a graffiti-covered schooner and recreating the bow scene from Titanic before getting annoyed and tossing Hart overboard.
The journey ends with P!nk watching her childhood home burn down as she tosses Hart aside one more time, and Willow falls asleep while her dream mom pushes the whole family — including little bro Jameson — up a steep mountain as they chill in a muscle car. “Let the walls crack, ’cause it lets the light in/ Let ‘em drag you through hell/ They can’t tell you to change who you are/ That’s all I know so far,” she sings with steely-eyed conviction on the chorus of the song that serves as the title track to her upcoming documentary/album of the same name.
Produced by Greg Kurstin and co-written by the singer and Oscar-, Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the song is a classic P!nk anthem about perseverance and strength and in the final image from the visual she comes full-circle. Joined by a supportive chorus of women and embraced by an aged, weepy Light, it seems like she’s finally achieved some peace … maybe.
“The saga of me and P!nk is very long and it is very rewarding we are so close,” said Meyers in a statement. “I have the longest stretch of my career with her so there’s always been a kind of brother/sister relationship that we’ve had. The beauty of where P!nk and I are now is really the culmination of 22 years of friendship. In this video, I am trying to capture the full breadth of who she is, where she has been and the troubled youth that’s evolved into this idea of the power of community. It is where we are in the world right now and displays the idea that we really need each other.”
The Michael Gracey-directed film P!nk: All I Know So Far hits Amazon Prime Video on May 21. The title song will also show up on the project’s official 16-track RCA Records soundtrack, All I Know So Far: Setlist, which features live takes on such iconic hits as “Just Like a Pill,” “Just Give Me a Reason” and “So What” as well as her MTV Video Vanguard Award Speech, covers of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Are the Champions” and her heart-swelling duet with daughter Willow, “Cover Me in Sunshine.”
Watch the “All I Know So Far” video below.
