Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch took a while to figure out the connection between the music video for "Poor Boy" and the song's lyrics. The cinematic Wes Anderson-esque features a young boy spying on the various residents living in a Glasgow tenement building across the street with a pair of binoculars. There's an old horticulturist, an eccentric man devoted to the study of telekinesis, a housewife with far too many carrots to dice, a rigorous boxer, a young aspiring soldier, two fitness enthusiasts, a tuba player, and Belle and Sebastian dancing around. These characters eventually turn their own gaze on the curious stalker, forcing him to confront his projections.
The human diversity on display ties in neatly with the song's album title (How to Solve Our Human Problems — Part 3), while imagining an alternative protagonist out of the song's catchy chorus: "Poor boy, I could never live up to your imagination." Despite the harmonic back-and-forth between Sarah Martin and Murdoch and the dance-worthy beat, the song itself presents a relatively bleak emotional trajectory. Martin sings from the perspective of a heartbreaker ("a crush that killed") who casually laments the fact that she could never deign to 'To be your comfort when you needed me/ Lay the everlasting friendship'. For a song that laments the impossibility of intimacy, "Poor Boy" is ironically upbeat and infectious.
