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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
A writer can write something with a certain theme, idea, or message in mind, and yet ten individuals can listen to or read that something and each of them will be impacted in a different way. Different people, depending on their own perspectives or walks of life will take something away that was totally different from the writer’s intention.
People may argue that writing a song with a specific message or theme that can have multiple potential perspectives is achieving the height of the art. I think that success comes from delivering a message in a song or story that everyone who reads or hears it not only identifies the writer’s intentional theme, but also notices other ideas and messages that they take away form it based on their personalities, current life situations, perspectives, etc. And I think that that is achieving the highest point of success when writing anything. I want to impact others with the message I weave into my story or song, and yet I want listeners or readers to take other things away from it that I didn’t put there that inspires or encourages them or causes them to think about things I never even thought of associating with the thing I wrote.
The song “Stressed Out” by Twenty One Pilots was put on my mental list of “questionable songs that might be good.” Only until recently, it was moved up to my mental list of “Personal Top 21 Songs.”
Okay, maybe not 21, but somewhere around that number. Shortly afterward, Twenty One Pilots became one of my six favorite music artists. Being a music freak who likes so many different types of music, making the top 6 is saying something. But it wasn’t just the music or the genre (if you could use the word “genre” in relevance to this particular band) that I liked about them. It was what they stood for and how their faith and encouragement to others showed in their lyrics and even the style of music. As a writer, this excited me way more than it probably should have. It was all I could talk about (and post on Facebook) for a few days.
