Overview
"Sandcastles in the Sand" is a song written by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays for the CBS television series How I Met Your Mother. The song was performed by Canadian actress Cobie Smulders in the role of Robin Scherbatsky, who has a secret past as a teenage Canadian pop star under the stage name Robin Sparkles. A follow-up to "Let's Go to the Mall" (2006), "Sandcastles in the Sand" was inspired by several 1980s pop ballads. The song was made available for streaming on April 15, 2008, before it appeared in an episode of the same name that aired on April 21. It was released as a single on April 23, and appeared on the soundtrack album How I Met Your Music (2012). "Sandcastles in the Sand" is a breakup ballad song about teenage love. The music video was shot at Zuma Beach, California, featuring Tiffany, Alan Thicke, and James Van Der Beek as her love interest.
Television and music critics praised the song's humor and compared it to "Let's Go to the Mall". It had sold 1,000 digital downloads in the United States as of August 2008, and the music video attracted more than 70,000 views online after 3 days of release. Smulders later reprised the role of Robin Sparkles in "Glitter" (2010) and "P.S. I Love You" (2013). Thicke and Van Der Beek also returned in multiple episodes.
Background and recording
Cobie Smulders played Robin Scherbatsky, a devoted broadcast journalist who moves from Canada for a job in New York, in the CBS television series How I Met Your Mother. In season 2's "Slap Bet" (2006), the character was revealed to have been a Canadian teen pop star under the stage name Robin Sparkles. That episode featured the song "Let's Go to the Mall", which had sold 4,000 digital downloads in the United States as of August 2008, while its music video received more than 300,000 viewers on MySpace and the CBS official website within the 10 days of its TV premiere. Smulders was pleased about the favorable reception towards the song, calling it "hilarious". Bays said that they had to "somehow build on the storyline or find a new dimension to it," and that the song would be "the perfect way to see another side of Sparkles ".
They found the inspiration for "Sandcastles in the Sand" from several 1980s pop ballads, particularly Belinda Carlisle's "Circle in the Sand" (1988), Debbie Gibson's "Foolish Beat" (1988), and Martika's "Toy Soldiers" (1989). Smulders spent hours in the recording studio with Thomas, where she changed parts of the audio "bit by bit". Thomas noticed her voice became "raspy" at nine in the morning. John Swihart, one of the show's composers, advised her to eat a green apple to smoothen it. Smulders improvised the line "I'm on the pill now!" and it was later added to the song. "The technology that these studios now have is pretty amazing. Anyone can go in and come out sounding OK, so I have that on my side," Smulders said.
In the episode, character Robin Scherbatsky reveals that "Sandcastles in the Sand" was a less-successful artistic follow-up to her minor hit "Let's Go To The Mall", with both songs released by Dominant Records on an album called Make It Sparkle. It was about her first boyfriend Simon, who led a rock band and had a collection of Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts. The couple met while making the music video for the song and broke up behind his van after spending a week and a half together.
Composition
Written by Bays and Thomas, it is a breakup ballad song with a runtime of 3 minutes and 33 seconds. The creators labeled it a "slow, mournful breakup song"; Smulders, on the other hand, called it a "pretty funny" and "a love ballad about teen heartbreak". She recalls "the greatest week and a half" of her life with her love interest: he taught her how to french kiss and they were "gonna travel the globe / From Alberta to Ontario". PopSugar and Isabelle Carreau of TV Squad described it as a "wistful", "touching", "overwrought, obviously-written-by-a-16-year-old" ballad. Whitney Pastorek of Entertainment Weekly felt that it was a "heartwrenching B-side" track, Vlada Gelman of TVLine declared the song a "temporary foray into semi-serious balladry". Alyssa Fikse of Uproxx noted similarities from the song to Gibson's power ballad "Only in My Dreams" (1986).
Fox News interpreted the recording as a "melodramatic torch song ... near and dear to Robin's heart".
Music video
, on the coast of Malibu, California. According to TV Squad, the show began to enlist more guest stars after the ratings success of "Ten Sessions", in which Britney Spears appeared in a cameo role. Writer Greg Malins, who had worked with James Van Der Beek, offered him a role in the episode. A week later, Tiffany and Alan Thicke confirmed their roles as Sparkles' friend and father, respectively. Thicke was a friend of director Pamela Fryman and had worked with her on Hope & Gloria. The faux music video for "Sandcastles in the Sand", and the 60th episode as a whole, was directed by Fryman. It was filmed at Zuma Beach, on the coast of Malibu, California, a week and a half after its parent episode was shot at the 20th Century Fox soundstage. The crew had to hurry to complete filming before the sun set.
Bays wanted the video to show Sparkles' origin story and what she was going through, from the "one time she loved so fully and gave herself over to her heart and got burned real bad by it." Sparkles' girlfriends appear in schoolgirl uniforms as a form of Greek chorus, lip-synching to the lyrics and jumping ropes. An animation shows a van going across a map from Alberta to Ontario; later, handwritten text reads, "It was the greatest week and a half of my life...R+S 4EVA." As the song's chorus begins, Sparkles writes the lyrics into her diary, sitting at a desk on the beach. In a chair behind her, her father smokes a pipe and reads a newspaper . He wears a sweater vest over a button-down shirt, which Eric Goldman of IGN compared to Thicke's appearance in his 1985–1992 sitcom Growing Pains.
There is a sandcastle with a small Canadian flag on top, and they are surrounded by other furnishings, a grandfather clock and a spinning globe. Robin's sidekick from the "Let's Go to the Mall" video, the Omnibot 2000, arrives with flowers to cheer up Sparkles.
Release
"Sandcastles in the Sand" appeared in an episode of the same name that aired on April 21, 2008. On April 23, it was released as a digital single by 20th Century Fox Records and Fox Music. It was also included in the show's season 3 DVD release. "Sandcastles in the Sand" garnered generally positive reviews from both television and music critics. Fox News called it a "worthy follow-up" to "Let's Go to the Mall". Ryan Keefer of DVD Talk thought that the video "totally exploits Robin's Canadian heritage" and is "one of the funniest things" from the show.
Mickey O'Connor of TV Guide felt that the song was "made of crack cocaine, and will be stuck in your head all day." PopSugar said that the video " has a great, dated vibe, with a dose of Heidi Montag beach video and an amazingly awkward Dawson-related make-out scene", According to Nielsen SoundScan, the song has sold 1,000 digital downloads in the United States as of August 2008. An instrumental version of "Sandcastles in the Sand" can be heard when Scherbatsky walks down the aisle in season 9's "The End of the Aisle".