What a Hand-Drawn Video Says About Rich Anthony's If I Were a Ghost
What a Hand-Drawn Video Says About Rich Anthony’s If I Were a Ghost
Twelve Years of Love Songs and Soft Rock, Then a Ghost with a Dog
The video for If I Were a Ghost was drawn by hand. Rnotte animated it in Looom on an iPad, laid a paper texture over the frames, and the upload says it plainly: not AI. That handmade finish suits the record, a playful folk-pop single that Rich Anthony released on 18 September 2026.
Rich Anthony has If I Were a Ghost in the playlist below, and the artist’s full run of coverage is on the Rich Anthony profile. The single reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Give it a listen with the video in mind, then read on for the twelve years behind it.
The song imagines a single day as a friendly ghost. In the artist’s own telling, one of the first stops would be a visit to a childhood dog. It also works as a Halloween song that holds up for the rest of the year. The credits name Richard Anthony Goberville as the writer, and the release is the artist’s own. The audience is easy to picture: people who like their indie pop whimsical, their folk light and their songs built around a story.
Before If I Were a Ghost, Rich Anthony Spent Twelve Years on Love Songs, Soft Rock and the 80s
The catalogue starts in 2014 with Electric Love, a seven-track album. A long gap follows. Then comes a busy 2022: five singles between January and June, and in July an album with its direction in the title, Back to the 80’s.
The titles since then read like a stack of love letters. If I Had Your Love, I Need Someone, Can It Be You, Make Me Yours, How Do I Say Goodbye. When If I Had Your Love came out in May 2023, the Brazilian blog INDIEOCLOCK heard a love song with a soft-rock pulse, the first single from a project about missing someone.
This year had already brought four releases by April, including a radio edit of Sunny Days, before a five-month pause ahead of the ghost song. There is a seasonal habit too. A Christmas single arrived in November 2025, and this autumn the calendar moved on to Halloween.
What Changed on If I Were a Ghost, and the Word Rich Anthony Keeps Coming Back To
What changed is the mood. After years of longing, this one plays. The lyric turns a free day into a list of small mischiefs: crash a wedding, photobomb a toast, chase cars in Zanzibar, moonwalk through the Louvre after dark.
Even the scares are polite. The ghost mixes up socks, makes the ceiling fans roar and resets the clocks. Midway, the fun pauses for a run of questions, including whether a ghost would still miss hugs and apple pie. In the last verse, the joke drops away. There are no chains and no moaning, just the wind and a coastline.
Harry Nilsson made the classic case for this kind of record. The Point! is a fable about a round-headed boy named Oblio and his dog Arrow. On 2 February 1971, ABC aired Fred Wolf’s animated film of it. It was the first animated feature shown in prime time on US television. A fable, a dog and a drawn world: If I Were a Ghost uses the same three ingredients on a smaller scale.
The Word That Keeps Coming Back
The through-line is one small word. If I Had Your Love and If Life Were Fair in 2023, If in 2024, and now If I Were a Ghost. Four titles start from a condition and picture another life. The new one simply asks the question with a sheet over its head.
Under the jokes, it also lands where the love songs did, with the ghost still watching over the people it loves. Jonathan Richman made the same turn in 1977. Rock ‘n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers put Ice Cream Man and Rockin’ Rockin’ Leprechauns next to traditional songs, then closed on Angels Watching over Me.
Watch the video first, because the drawings set the tone. Then go back to If I Had Your Love from 2023 to hear where the tenderness in this catalogue started.
AltPop.News’s curator team: “A song this light would sink under slick visuals. Rnotte’s paper overlay gives If I Were a Ghost the feel of a picture book you keep on the shelf, and that styling choice is half of its charm.”
Follow Rich Anthony on Spotify, TikTok, Facebook and the YouTube channel. The single is also on Apple Music.
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