“Automatic Flowers” by Our Lady Peace

"Automatic Flowers" was the third single lifted from Clumsy, the second album by Canadian alt-rockers Our Lady Peace, and it went out in July 1997. Arnold Lanni, who produced, wrote it with Raine Maida. Maida built it around a character he pictured: a woman living alone in a drab apartment with no real view and not much of a life, who pulls a pop-up book from her boxes of childhood things and opens it to a garden of pop-up flowers whenever she needs cheering up. Only traces of that story make it into the words.

The band directed the video themselves for the first time, playing in a dim Toronto rehearsal room, and it hit number one on MuchMusic's countdown that October.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.