The new song, “Bird on a Wire” by Van Plating was completely unplanned and came from a time in her life where everything seemed to be changing in her music career and personal life.
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“It was written in a time when I was feeling very very weighed down by a lot of things in my life”
About 10 years ago, the indie band that Plating had been working with started to break up, just because of life. After that she stopped writing for a while, stuck to playing music in church and started a family.
Eventually, Things started to pick back up again, causing a lot of change in her and her husband’s life. They got to a point where they were experiencing “life whiplash.”
“There’s a lot of love in that song, but the reality of relationships that are long term is that it’s hard. It’s beautiful and it’s hard. We learn as we grow that we can’t carry the other person on our back … We were drowning in hard things, but we weren’t going to abandon each other. “
Putting your feelings into words can be difficult, so when Plating decided she was ready to start writing music again, all these emotions suddenly became a song.
“I tend to write lyrically from where I am. So I was improvising the melody and the way I was feeling just came out.”
Plating co-wrote this song with Brian Elijah Smith. These songwriters met through social media and they just clicked musically. They had mutual friends and had listened to each other’s music after a brief exchange of messages on Instagram, but had never worked together before.
“It was just really easy, he’s very easy to write with … that just doesn’t tend to happen, but it worked and I’m grateful for that.”
The theme of this song and the next few singles that will follow is poetic imagery. She is using this time at home to continue pursuing her music career and because of this, she is learning what she really wants her sound to be.
“I tend to use very visual cues in my writing to kind of take you to a place to get you to that emotion. These songs will all have that undercurrent … There won’t be any distance between the listener and the vocal, it will be very personal.”
These songs will pull the listener in and make them feel as though they are able to push through the heavy changes in their lives, just as Plating did.
“You might see something different from that imagery than I do, but that’s okay because it’s reaching you and that’s the point.”
Listen to Plating’s “Bird on a Wire” here:
