Song Research

 This blog post, (written by Jasmine), outlines the research and analysis of the song we choose for our project, 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER', by Billie Eilish (2024). It includes the song's message, our reason for selecting it, the initial concept for we envision for the music video, and how our execution will differ from the original music video.

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.

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. 

Reflection : Since we wanted our music video to revolves around themes of friendship, we initially found it difficult to choose between 'Glue Song' by Beabadoobee and 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER' by Billie Eilish. Therefore, we decided to discuss as a team, to see which would better suit our vision. 

As seen above, my teammate (Rachelle) and I explored various ways we could portray the music video to fit specific lyrics, aiming to shift the theme from romance to friendship. Through this process, we realized that 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER' would likely be a better fit for a friendship-centered storyline, as it doesn’t explicitly lean into a romantic narrative. By contrast, Glue Song, is clearly about romance and love. I think Jasmine did really well on the in-depth research too, as it gave us a deeper understanding of the lyrics. This will be very useful for us to change the original connotations to convey the message we want to express in our version of the song.