Birdy – Wings
2013 · Directed by Sophie Muller
1.2M Likes
Best comments
1.“People here: 'Vampire Diaries!' Me: 'Depressed.'”
More comments
- 2.“The kinda music I listen to when the homies aren't around.”
- 3.“If this isn't played at my funeral, I'm not dying.”
The story
Birdy was 17 when this came out, and Sophie Muller threw her one hell of a party. The video drops her into a flamboyant mansion packed with eccentric, showy guests – masks, acrobats, people fencing, horses wandering through – and she sings through the middle of it like somebody whose mind is on a person who isn't in the room.
Wings was a single from Fire Within, her second album. She wrote it with Ryan Tedder, who produced it with Rich Costey. It became her biggest UK hit, peaking at number eight, and went all the way to number one in Ireland. It also turned up in The Vampire Diaries, in an episode that aired on her 18th birthday.
Then it had a second life. In 2015 Lloyds Bank built its 250th anniversary ad, Horse Story, around the song, and Wings climbed right back to number eight in the UK. Horses in the video, horses in the ad. The song knows its crowd.
