Credit: Jake Mulka
The Messenger Birds’ new album, “GRAMMY AWARD WINNING ALBUM IT'S ALL A BLUR” and the band are here to break down each track.
FAKE LIVES: "FAKE LIVES" portrays the overwhelming emotional exhaustion of trying to meet every expectation of an increasingly superficial world. Despite easier access to people and information, we have only become more dissociated, self-centered, and inauthentic.
LOST THE PLOT: "LOST THE PLOT" centers around the obsession of finding deeper meaning or hidden patterns in the minutia and chaos of everything but always feeling like you’re missing something or simply assigning purpose where it doesn’t exist. It’s ambiguous and disorienting, and there are always too many threads to follow.
BLACK HOLE LOVE: "BLACK HOLE LOVE" delves into the paradox of time and human nature—trapped in self-destructive cycles, torn between intellectualism and mindlessness, and fixated on surface-level change. With its haunting atmosphere, the song explores the tension between longing for transformation and the inevitability of repetition.
REPRISE: "REPRISE" is mainly about identity struggle. Sometimes it takes pretending to be something you’re not to figure out who you really are. There’s a funny story about where the original idea for this song came from, and it’s actually in the lyrics but in a bit less detail. I was standing in line on a 90 degree summer day in Michigan waiting to get ice cream, and there was this big festival going on–classic cars parading the city blocks, families with children running around and lined up on the sidewalk to watch, live music, etc.
Anyway, there was this cover band, classic Boomer-aged dad rock, playing about 50 feet from where I was standing in line, and they went into this bossa nova style tune when I suddenly realized I knew the lyrics and couldn’t figure out why. Then it hit me–they were singing their own altered version of “Ladder Song” by Bright Eyes, a melancholy song about losing a friend to suicide, and I was pretty sure I was the only other person there who knew the song in that moment. The juxtaposition of what they were playing and the circumstances surrounding it made for such a strange experience that I had to write it down.