Welcome to The Drop, Refinery29's new home for exclusive music video premieres. We want to shine the spotlight on women artists whose music inspires, excites, and (literally) moves us. This is where we'll champion their voices.
Fans of Meg Myers know she's not one to conceal her emotions, and her new music video for "Jealous Sea" might be her rawest yet. The project, from her latest album, Take Me To The Disco, was directed by Clara Aranovich and is premiering exclusively on Refinery29. "Jealous Sea" and its accompanying video is an expression of eerily beautiful frustration that is sure to get under your skin.
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"And I don't think I can stop the jealousy," the lyrics read. "When it comes, it comes like waves and I can't breathe."
Over the phone, Myers was open about the time in her life that inspired her to write this song, and spoke about what it was like to take the lyrics fans are already loving (it currently has over 300,000 listens on Spotify) and translate it into something that would captivate an audience while still remaining true to herself. It's safe to say the Tennessee native perfectly struck that balance.
These lyrics are so powerful. How did it feel to get this song off your chest?
"First off, I wrote this song originally a few years ago. I had a fiancé at the time. He was on tour. We were both struggling with jealousy, so it was kind of about both of us. Because I was either on the road or he was on the road and we were both really jealous. I definitely needed to release it. But I wrote it originally as a folk song. It was a pretty sort of country-ish folk song, and I thought that would be funny to do because it’s such intense lyrics.
I ended up leaving it alone for a while. We tried to record it but the folk thing didn’t make sense to me for this record and so when we started making the record we revisited ‘Jealous Sea’ and it was lyrically such an important song to me, melodically too...We just made it really dark, we changed some of the lyrics around. I think that subject is something that it’s been my main — this is a really vulnerable thing to say for me — it’s been my main struggle."
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Similarly, there’s a lot of emotion and anger in this video. Was it ever draining or difficult to bring forward those feelings?
"I wasn’t sure what I wanted and for this. Clara Aranovich did my first video on this label, the single ‘Numb,’ and that turned out so beyond my expectations so I was excited that she wanted to do another video with me. So I felt confident leaving this baby in her hands. In a way it’s not the opposite of ‘Numb’ but kind of is because it’s the many sides of Meg. It just felt like i could get really weird with it and show another side, the crazy side."
What’s next for you?
"I’m on tour for another two to three weeks, I’ve been out for a couple weeks now. There’s a bunch more shows. Definitely more music videos and I think I’m also doing another tour in December. A lot of touring. Just throwing together some more songs, releasing some more songs. I have a couple things up my sleeve that I can’t say but I’m so excited for it."