Still from “Maps” official music video (2003, directed by Patrick Daughters, ©Interscope Records)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 single “Maps” always struck me as the perfect love song. It conveys all the vulnerability that comes with opening yourself up completely to someone else along with the awful desperation of realizing it may not be quite enough, however much you declare, over and over, They don’t love you like I love you. That aching mantra, delivered by the band’s Karen O with “so much feeling, so much heart” (words she used to praise Neil Young’s and Jeff Mangum’s voices years later) and accompanied by Nick Zinner’s razor-sharp guitar work and David Chase’s propulsive drumming, created an iconic song about heartbreak that has improbably ended up becoming a first-dance staple at weddings.
   I can’t imagine why it took me nearly two decades to discover the music video for the song, which I stumbled across just a couple of days ago. Directed by Patrick Daughters, it takes place in a high-school cafeteria with the band on a makeshift stage and the crew and assorted others standing around or sitting on folding chairs facing the stage. A mashup of the breaking-the-fourth-wall and live-concert music video genres, it kicks off with a tracking shot from the craft-services table at the back of the room to the stage as the director yells various instructions to the crew. After “Action, Nick!,” Zimmer starts that now-iconic trilling guitar riff and we’re off.
   Just past the videos’s halfway point, at the instrumental bridge, O’s lips start to quiver. Eventually, a tear runs down one cheek, then another. Her performance throughout the entire video is remarkable, but from this point forward it becomes riveting, and she finishes out the song on the edge of what can only be perceived as deep despair. It’s certainly not the first or last time a performer’s tears have been featured in a music video, but I would argue it’s certainly the most authentic and moving instance of it. The singer later explained to NME that she was overcome during filming because her boyfriend at the time, Liars’ frontman Angus Andrew, was hours late to the shoot and she was leaving on tour the next day. When he finally appeared, she got herself “into a real emotional state.”
   I can’t get enough of this video, just as I’ll never get enough of the song that inspired it. It’s always hard to fully articulate why you become obsessed with a particular piece of music, but in this case, the video for “Maps” has helped me understand my devotion to it a little better. Losing a loved one—whether that loss is the result of personal choice or fate — engenders a particular kind of sadness nearly every human being will face, sooner or later. “Maps” is one of those rare works of art that not only charts that sadness, but locates the beauty in it by reminding us, in the visceral way only music can, that it’s one thing we all share—one thing every one of us understands on the deepest level. Watching this exceptional singer experience that sadness as she performs a song that evokes it so richly brings that commonality home in a profound way.
   In a 2019 concert video in Guadalajara, Mexico, a buoyant Karen O stage-banters for several minutes as Zinner and Chase cycle through the opening section of “Maps.” She offer a series of dedications — to the crew backstage, to her bandmates and their families, and, finally, to the audience and to “the someone [they] loved and lost.” When she stops the performance mid-song to ask the crowd to join her in singing that indelible mantra, the sense of solidarity as the entire arena sings it, over and over, is overwhelming—to us, and clearly to her, too.
   It’s a transcendent moment, imbued with the kind of love and connection and mutual regard that, I have to believe, can bind us together for longer than the length of a song.