The Joke in the Glass

Marina Diamandis built The Family Jewels around the gap between performed contentment and its opposite—she’s always been interested in the masks people wear and what happens when they slip. Shampain is one of those slippage moments. The title pun threatens to make the whole thing camp, but her voice doesn’t play it that way—she delivers it over a spare piano-and-synth arrangement with the weariness of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and knows it isn’t working. Drinking to feel present. Toasting to nothing in particular. The album came out in February 2010 and by the time this video appeared in September she was already a name, already a certain kind of famous, and the track felt less like promotion than a note she’d written herself about what that costs.