twenty one pilots is a duo of Colombus, Ohio natives, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun.The band began in 2009 as a trio of Joseph and two others. The original three members released one album before splitting in 2011, which is when drummer Dun entered the picture.
The pair has stayed strong since. They signed with Fueled by Ramen in 2012 and released their third album, Vessel in 2013. This album helped them gain popularity with songs like House of Gold and Car Radio, a redone version of a song off their second album, Regional at Best from 2011.
Their two most recent albums have had the greatest success. Their 2015 release, Blurryface, was the first album where every song was certified gold. Six of the 14 songs even reached platinum. Their most recent album, Trench, was released in early October of 2018 and has been on Billboards top 100 album sales chart for 26 weeks. The album peaked at #2 and is currently #88.
Despite the popularity, their songs are not full of meaningless fluff and many contain themes of depression, anxiety, and more. In Trench, Joseph writes from the perspective of a fictional world which he created to, among other things, represent depression.
Writing in this way is one of the ways that Joseph has said he has found purpose, which has been a resounding theme throughout the bands albums. Kitchen Sink from Regional at Best discusses this directly. In the first verse Joseph raps,
“I’m a kitchen sink
You don’t know what that means
Because a kitchen sink to you is not a kitchen sink to me
Okay, friend?
Are you searching for purpose?
Then write something, yeah it might be worthless
Then paint something, and it might be wordless
Pointless curses, nonsense verses
You’ll see purpose start to surface
No one else is dealing with your demons, meaning
Maybe defeating them could be the beginning of your meaning, friend.”
Joseph writes this in an attempt to encourage himself and others to find purpose through the process of creating. Even if the creation is of no value to anyone else, it can still have value to the creator.
twenty one pilots would not be who they are without this aspect of themselves, the striving for meaning and to connect with others. So many aspects of their works seem to be to help others think and find meaning for themselves. This is typified by the third verse of Car Radio,
“Faith is to be awake
And to be awake is for us to think
And for us to think is to be alive
And I will try with every rhyme
To come across like I am dying
To let you know you need to try to think.”
We can all learn something from this band. We all want meaning, purpose, and value in our lives. As twenty one pilots shows, one way to find meaning, is to create.
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