Song Choice

Angel On Fire - Halsey

 

Halsey, also known as Ashley Frangipane, is an American singer and songwriter. She has been making music since 2014, with her EP 'Room 93' and recently grown in popularity with her albums 'Badlands' and 'Hopeless Fountain Kingdom', as well as her most well known songs 'Colours', 'New Americana', and 'Ghost'.

Angel on Fire is song by Halsey featured as the 14th track on the deluxe version of 'Hopeless Fountain Kingdom'. The song is written by Halsey herself and written and produced by Greg Kurstin.

Reason for choosing:

The song itself does not have a music video yet, which is one of the reasons why we thought that it was an appropriate song choice. We wanted to be original in our idea and not influenced by an official music video so we could interpret the lyrics freely.

The meaning of song and lyrics was also important and we took theme of mental illness into our initial video ideas. We both have personal connection to this topic and we thought it would interesting and also topical to discuss conceptually in a music video.  

These ideas link to the video and have been used to influence our video:

• reminiscing of good times when the main character was at the centre of attention juxtaposed with ideas of severe anxiety preventing them from being involved 
• links to the ancient myth of Icarus taken from Greek mythology - Icarus flies too close to the sun in an attempt to show off and the wax wings melt, causing him to plummet into the ocean below from dangerous overconfidence 
• established main character as a serial party-girl - ties into The Great Gatsby where Gatsby's parties were always filled with people but he never was interesting in talking to them (no matter if she includes herself in conversation or not, no one is going to be interested in talking to her)
• Shakespearean influence in tragedy especially Romeo and Juliet
• motifs of fire and ashes might represent a phoenix and how she is coming to life again after burning from toxic relationships and other problems she has had
• the main character also used to feel she had power and a voice until members of society discovered her sexuality and used it against her, turning their back to her

Conceptual meaning of the lyrics and metaphors have been key in why we have chosen to do this song. This has helped us come up with rough ideas for the video. 

Permission 

In order to use the song in our video, we needed to ask Halsey's record label for permission. For this, we wrote an email to Astralwerks:

We are still waiting for a response however, when the video goes up on YouTube, rights will be automatically given to the record label and monitised by them so we will be allowed to keep the video up as long as we have credited Astralwerks.