Song Research

Here we will look in detail at our song choice: 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER, Billie Eilish' 2024. This blogpost was written entirely by me, Jasmine.

General song background and message:

Based on several websites discussing the meaning of this song, here is the overall intended message:

This song was originally intended to be a love song. This song leans towards the common theme of being willing to die for a lover or loving them until death, according to Finneas, the artist's producer and brother. Although, compared to the usual passionate love conveyed in songs, this song was meant to be more about a toxic relationship where one partner would love-bomb another (meaning to shower a partner with love, gifts, and affection and then just stop and leave them hanging after a while, this is a common manipulation tactic in relationships). 

In the second verse, it can also be noted that this song also discusses themes such as insecurity. This verse describes how it is to really love someone, making them look amazing through your eyes and wanting them to know or see themselves through your eyes too. To further add to this, this verse also mentions that a partner not being able to see how amazing they are almost seems like a bit or a joke.

However, after listening to the song, many listeners strayed from this message and instead interpreted and derived many different connotations from this song's lyrics. Learning this, Billie Eilish herself has encouraged this and is accepting towards different interpretations of the song's message. 

In the end of all of this, this song is mainly about persisting through the challenges faced during relationships and the pain that comes with persisting in a toxic relationship. This song doesn’t only convey negative emotions, however it paints a more complex picture of feelings and shows that toxic relationships are not always filled with unhealthy feelings, but also sweet moments. This can often make it hard for people to pull away from their toxic partners.

This can also be shows as the overall beat of the song can be described as almost sweet, uplifting and positive. This can possibly used to symbolize the underlying toxicity in relationships as this uplifting beat masks the deep meaning of the song’s lyrics.

Why we chose this song:

We chose this song mainly because we wanted to make a music video surrounding friendship. Although that isn't the intended underlying meaning to the song, we realized that by using this song, we could be able to interpret and send our message through the song. Although it is a love song, due to the nature of the lyrics, we are able to relate it to deep relationships between friends. This is also a popular interpretation of the song on social media platforms such as Tik-Tok who have popularized this song by making friendship based content with it. 

We discussed which song to pick before the project through a communication app called WhatsApp. Here is what my teammate, Rachelle, came up with for the concept of the music video using this song:

How we will differentiate our music video:

The original music video was mainly symbolic and described the song lyrics with visuals in which audiences could see to find deeper connotations in. In our music video, we are looking to subvert this and instead be a bit more illustrative with our visualizations of the song’s lyrics. We will do this because we want the audience to be able to derive a solid dominant reading from watching the music video. We would also like our music video to be more saturated and warm compared to the original music video which has a cool color grading. We want to be able to visualize the fleeting moments of childhood friendship by using multiple locations, showing that days are passing by. This subverts the original music video, which only uses a single location for the setting of the entire music video.

Self-reflection:

Doing this song research was quite interesting. Initially, I sort of knew that this song surrounded themes about love in general as I had found the song through social media platforms such as Tik-tok which had used this song in order to portray love related scenarios such as friendship and romance. However, after learning more about the intended meaning of the song and looking closer into the lyrics, I realised how deep and impactful the meaning of this song really was. I could have never guessed that the artist would even use the melody of the song itself to portray and symbolise the very message she wanted to convey. Analysing the song deeper also helped me gain more understanding towards the lyrics, this will be useful for deciding how we would want to spin the original connotations of the song lyrics in order to connote towards the message of our own version of the song. I feel like if I do this again, I’ll make sure to invest more time into doing the research as it is rather important towards the development of the music video.