BTS: How MAX Found a Way to Include Suga in the ‘Blueberry Eyes’ Music Video
Max Schneider, known professionally as MAX, will release his album Colour Vision on Sept. 18. The album features a collaboration with Suga of BTS on the song “Blueberry Eyes.” MAX released the song and a music video for “Blueberry Eyes” on Sept. 15. While Suga was not actually able to be in the music video, MAX found a special way to include the BTS rapper.
The two previously collaborated on the song ‘Burn It’
MAX and Suga originally met in January of this year when MAX was on tour in Seoul. A month later, Suga was in Los Angeles with BTS to promote their album Map of the Soul: 7, and the two got to know each other better.
On May 22, Suga released his second mixtape under the pseudonym Agust D called D-2. MAX was featured on the song “Burn It.” It turns out MAX and Suga were working on “Blueberry Eyes” and “Burn It” at the same time.
“I think it worked out, because his stuff for ‘Burn It’ was pretty much done, and it was mostly me going back and forth, nailing what he wanted,” MAX told Buzzfeed.
According to MAX, Suga liked “Blueberry Eyes” the most out of all the songs on Colour Vision and elected to be featured on that track.
“I just sent him the whole album. I basically said, ‘Here’s all the songs, you tell me what you want to be on, and I’ll make it work. I’m grateful to have you on any song.’ And he liked ‘Blueberry Eyes.’ I’d already written the song, so I think that probably helped the message, because it was very clear that there was a sweet, loving, dream world to it,” he said.
How MAX included BTS’ Suga in the music video
The music video for “Blueberry Eyes” features MAX and his wife Emily, who is pregnant with the couple’s first child. In the music video, Suga’s verse is played over a wedding scene, and MAX and his wife recite the verse as wedding vows. To make sure Suga was included, the music video showed a brief shot of a cat, referencing an inside joke among BTS fans that Suga resembles a cat.
“We learned the entire Korean [verse], and those were our vows in our quarantine wedding. Of course, we threw a little cat in there to make it feel like Yoongi was part of it, because unfortunately he couldn’t be in the video — we wanted every bit of his spirit to be there, even though he wasn’t there,” MAX told Buzzfeed.
He continued, “… but now I know a bit of Korean, which is awesome. I’m going to keep diving in. I literally texted him right after saying, ‘I just learned your whole verse in Korean, now I hope we can have more conversations in Korean, because it was so hard to learn.'”
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What MAX learned from Suga
Having collaborated on two songs now, MAX told Buzzfeed what he has been able to learn from working with the BTS rapper.
“… with Suga… Having language not be a hindrance, because you’re coming from the same emotive place. Going to Korea — that whole trip changed my life. It made me realise which songs people connect with, not necessarily because of the specific lyrics, but because of what’s behind it,” he said. “That transcends language. That collaboration taught me so much, and that was so special.”
