Our Fan-Made Music Video of “Trees” by Twenty Øne Piløts

Recently, my brother and I finally finished our music video of “Trees” by TØP, after a year in the making. It’s very similar to our music video of “Stressed Out,” as we dubbed in cinematography and lip syncing to the original track. Trees, if you’ve ever listened to it before, has a completely different feel in the message, theme, and energy from Stressed Out. I wrote a post years back on my interpretation of the lyrics from Trees and I wanted to incorporate that into our music video––however, we ended up with a story that involved Blurryface and fear and a setting that doesn’t fall too short of a mind palace.

Lyric Interpretation of “Neon Gravestones” by Twenty Øne Piløts

Let’s talk about Twenty Øne Piløts. Again. Because they just recently released a new album called Trench, which is very exciting, and there’s a particular song I want to talk about.

“Jumpsuit” by Twenty Øne Piløts: Music Video Analysis Part 2

Today, I’m picking up where I left off in last week’s post, Part 1 of my music video analysis of Twenty Øne Piløts’s song “Jumpsuit.” Which would be about at 2:15 in the music video itself:

Their new song “Levitate” was just recently released, and as far as we know, it is the third and last video of a three-part story that is seen clearly throughout “Jumpsuit” and “Nico and the Niners.” In Part 1, I gave some needed context about the Dema storyline which explains everything that happens in their earlier music videos and their new Trench videos, including Jumpsuit. In order to understand the context of this interpretation, check out the updated Dema explanation in my Part 1 post, or watch this brilliant video (brilliant, yes, but has some profanity). But, picking up from where we left off in the music video, Tyler (or Clancy) has found himself in a ravine receiving stares from some a shady-looking group up on the cliffs—who are actually members of his rebellion that escaped back at Dema— and is encountering Nico, A.K.A. Blurryface on a white horse. The last thing I talked about was how Tyler seems to be either giving into the protection he trusts that his jumpsuit will provide him or is under a trance that Nico puts him under as he gallops toward him (which, according to the theories presented in the video about the Dema storyline, seems to be the most accurate).

“Jumpsuit” by Twenty Øne Piløts: Music Video Analysis Part 1

Twenty Øne Piløts recently released two songs for their new album “Trench”: “Jumpsuit” and “Nico and the Niners.” If you haven’t yet heard this news, you were asleep. Time to wake up.

First off, the people I know who are TØP fans either really like or dislike their new songs. I think this is either because “Jumpsuit” and “Nico and the Niners” are different from their Blurryface tracks in style (especially “Nico and the Niners,” which is defintely more hip-hop and surprisingly my favorite of the two). I feel that to completely understand the lyrics, you have to be up to date with what Tyler and Josh have been doing during their year-long hiatus, which involved stuff like letters from “Clancy,” that they posted on a DMA website (referenced in “Nico and the Niners” as a place, “Dema”). At least they kept the fans busy hyping over clues they dropped on there once in a while. They’re worse than Gollum and his riddles.

My Top 5 Favorite Musicals

Storytelling in music is one of my favorite things, from lyrics to genres, from film scores to musicals. And we’ll stop at musicals, because that is the topic of this post. What’s so unique about musicals is that they are purely theatrical—meaning that they are purposely unrealistic (which is the main reason why many people dislike them). So, here’s my short list of my top 5 favorites, in no particular order.

3 Writing Exercises with Music

Sometimes you need to take a break from your main writing project. Spending all your writing time on just one project can get overwhelming and you might notice that your coffee fuel starts draining faster the longer and more often you spend working on one particular story. When it comes to my writing for Fiction’s Lie, schoolwork and essay writing has forced it aside. And when push comes to shove, my actual novel writing topples out of the once beautiful picture.

But, putting the school work and non-creative writing aside, it’s important to take breaks. And one of the best ways spending those breaks is working on another writing project. It doesn’t matter what kind of writing that is. It can be a poem, a random scene, experimenting with characters, dialog, action scenes, description, you name it. I call these writing breaks writing exercises because not only do you give you a fresh mind and some time away from your big WIP project, they also strengthen your writing, so that when you come back to your WIP after that break, you’ll feel rejuvenated and armed with some skills or scenes or new ideas to add to your manuscript.

Why I Made a Twenty Øne Piløts Music Video (+ the Actual Video)

For years I’ve wanted to make a film. For years I had a boundless number of ideas flooding my brain of images and specific visuals that I wished I could somehow produce for the screen for us to see. And it was terribly frustrating because I could never take the ideas out of my head and put them into reality without the skill, the aid, the time, the money, and the people to help. I had stories I wanted to write, yes, but I wanted some of those stories to accompany visuals and music to make them seem real. 

And then I discovered Twenty Øne Piløts. I fell in love with their music for many different reasons and so one day I decided to draw a rough sketch of a storyboard for a music video for one of their most popular songs, “Stressed Out.” Drawing the storyboard at the beginning of summer 2017, I had no idea that it would be good enough in 5 months to get put on YouTube. That was the ultimate goal, but I wasn’t sure then that it would ever happen.