SONG OF THE DAY

“Fire­flies” (Ocean Eyes, Uni­ver­sal Repub­lic Records, 2009). Writ­ten by Adam Young.

WHERE I HEARD IT

It was fea­tured on this sea­son of So You Think You Can Dance (see the video of the per­for­mance below).

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- Owl City is a Sec­ond Wave syn­th­pop musi­cal project by Amer­i­can Adam Young.
– Young started out mak­ing music in his base­ment in his home­town of Owatonna, Minnesota, US, later devel­op­ing a fol­low­ing through his MySpace pro­file before being signed to Uni­ver­sal Repub­lic.
– After two inde­pen­dent albums, Owl City gained main­stream pop­u­lar­ity from the 2009 major label debut album Ocean Eyes, which spawned the hit sin­gle “Fire­flies”.
– “Fire­flies” topped the US and Cana­dian charts and became the most-downloaded song on iTunes in the US.
– Ocean Eyes reached the top ten on the US album charts and topped the US elec­tronic charts and also reached Ama­zon MP3’s top 10 most down­loaded album list. By Decem­ber 2009, it was cer­ti­fied Gold in the United States.
– On 24 Jan­u­ary 2010, Owl City reached the num­ber 1 spot in the UK Top 40 Sin­gles chart with “Fire­flies”.
– Relient K vocal­ist Matt Thiessen has toured and col­lab­o­rated with Owl City on sev­eral tracks includ­ing in the hit sin­gle “Fire­flies”, where Matt can be heard as the backup vocals.
– Thiessen described the song as “a lit­tle song about bugs and not being able to fall asleep at night,” though the fire­flies in the song’s title also serve as a metaphor for the loss of child­like imag­i­na­tion and won­der in adult­hood.
– Ocean Eyes has received mixed reviews from crit­ics, based on a Meta­critic score of 53/100. The album gained some pos­i­tive reviews, includ­ing Enter­tain­ment Weekly which gave it a B+ and said that it was filled with catchy cho­ruses and that the high­light was “Den­tal Care”. Jesus Freak Hide­out also was favor­able; the review high­lighted the album’s style of music, say­ing that it had “dreamy lyrics and open sound­scapes.” How­ever, Rolling Stone claimed Ocean Eyes to be dis­ap­point­ing, only award­ing it 2/5 stars. They espe­cially crit­i­cized the slower songs, say­ing that tracks like “On the Wing” were “just mush”. Allmusic gave the album an aver­age rat­ing of 2.5/5.
– The sin­gle has attained world­wide suc­cess, top­ping the charts in the United States, Aus­tralia, Bel­gium, Den­mark, Ire­land, Swe­den, Nor­way, the United King­dom, and the Nether­lands.
– The music video for “Fire­flies” was directed by Steve Hoover. It fea­tures Adam Young play­ing the song on a Lowrey spinet organ in a toy-filled bed­room, where most of the toys (includ­ing an astro­naut, toy cars, and a blimp) come to life. Most of the toys are older model toys, with most of them from the 1970s and ‘80s (an excep­tion being a Robosapien).
– The video had an exclu­sive pre­miere on MySpace, but was leaked onto Dai­ly­mo­tion some time before and YouTube soon after.
– “Fire­flies” was cov­ered by Finnish X Fac­tor con­tes­tant Enchant on the program, by Amer­i­can Idol sea­son 9 con­tes­tant Lee DeWyze on the program, by Nick Jonas & The Admin­is­tra­tion at The Who I Am Tour, by Eng­lish rock­band Elliot Minor, by Cheryl Cole for BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge & on The E.N.D. World Tour, in Hardcore/ Screamo style by Beau­ti­ful Dying Day, West­coast rap­per Crooked I of Slaugh­ter­house and has made it to the cov­eted playlist of Kidz Bop 17.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Here’s the offi­cial music video:

And here’s the song’s fea­ture on So You Think You Can Dance, which is where I first heard it: