Our music video for San Francisco-based singer/songwriter Mae Powell’s “Scratch N Sniff” tells a playful, uplifting and poignantly relatable story of coming together after time spent longingly apart. It all starts with a shooting star, before an envelope sealed with a heart makes its way through animated space and time. Mae Powell sings lovingly as she marvels at the lost art of the letter, which offers something uniquely sentimental that virtual communications can never seem to replicate—“Scratch n sniff all of the letters you sent to me / Your hands are on this little piece of paper, and now the paper’s touching me.” 

With vibrant colors and playful caricatures of sun and moon, clouds and stars, illustrator Emily Hoang creates a joyful and lighthearted visual world to match Powell’s lyrics of hope and togetherness. It is a world of smiling and skateboarding celestial bodies, where hearts and rainbows hang in the sky alongside the stars, and where colored beams of love and light reign supreme. We see our sun and moon pen pals become one, and as their love pours out in color to fill the screen, we are filled with the hope that our dreams of togetherness will soon become a reality, and that together, we can emit the same love and light into the world.