Raincatchers

Album: Portraits (2023)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is about a childhood pal of Birdy's named Aaron. As they got older, they went separate ways when their lives took different paths.

    We used to be the raincatchers
    And we couldn't see what we were running from
    You made me feel like
    Nothing really matters


    Birdy told The Sun: "'Raincatchers' is about a friend of mine and how we grow apart when I first went out on the road. It's also about the inner child and accepting my younger self and the mistake she made finding her way and remembering how to be young and carefree."
  • Birdy co-wrote and co-produced "Raincatchers" with Barney Lister (Rina Sawayama's "Hold That Girl," Joy Crookes' "Feet Don't Fail Me Now"). Tom Grennan and Kyle Minogue collaborator Anya Jones also helped with the songwriting.
  • Birdy transforms into a benevolent giant in the "Raincatchers" video, offering a helping hand to her younger self, played by Eleanor Hockley, trapped within a world where individuality is crushed by soulless routines and suffocating rules.

    "Birdy is not a kid anymore," the director Max McLachlan told Promo News. "The world has known her since she was barely a teenager. She wanted a music video that would shed the dainty image of her as a naive child but address the years of youth lost having to play grown-up in the industry. What better way to show how much she's grown than to make her a giant?"
  • Birdy unleashed "Raincatchers" as the lead single from her fifth album, Portraits, on March 3, 2023. Trading the introspective folk sounds of the past for an '80s-infused synthpop explosion, the album echoes with the influences of Prince, Bowie, Madonna, and Kate Bush. This sonic shift mirrored Birdy's desire to escape her musical comfort zone after the emotional recording of her previous breakup album, Young Heart. And "Raincatchers," with its Kate Bush-esque vocal power and storm-summoning beat, was the manifesto of this artistic metamorphosis.

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