Jaunty Sea Shanty Uses Dozens of Montauk Boat Names for Lyrics

Filmmaker and Montauker Emily Anderson recently released this brilliant video for “Captain Jack’s Family Jewels,” a sea shanty created in collaboration with NYC-based singer-songwriter Alec Gross, featuring the names of dozens of boats in Montauk.

“I was really interested in why people call their boats what they did,” Anderson says, explaining how she came up the clever video idea. A former designer, Anderson says she was fascinated by the names and typography on boats, and she began photographing them. After photographing some 500 names, the filmmaker realized she could put them together in some sort of haiku or story.

“There’s something deeper here,” she recalls thinking before penning a story, using only the boat names, about “naughty Captain Jack.” But something was missing. She called upon Gross to turn the story into a song, and then recruited editor George Gross (no relation to Alec) to turn the song and her images into a video.

It’s all about “me loving typography and boat names and also having nothing to do,” Anderson says of “Captain Jack’s Family Jewels.”

Anderson has directed films for a wide array of companies, including American Express, ESPN and X Games, San Pellegrino, Spotify and many more. She’s also been a creative director for entities such as J.Crew, Metallica, MoCA, NASCAR, Patagonia, AV Club, The Surf Lodge and Urban Outfitters, to name  a few. She created The Usual magazine in 2011 as “a love letter to Montauk,” and continues to put forth that vision in videos like “Captain Jack’s Family Jewels.” She also loves to surf.

Learn more about Emily Anderson at littleenglishgenius.com.