Today we celebrate the 11th Birthday of ‘Someday (I Will Understand)’.
The music video for “Someday (I Will Understand)” was directed by Michael Haussman. Britney commented that he “[did] a great job capturing the song, the essence and the emotion” and added that the video had “a different feeling” from any of her previous videos. It was shot entirely in black and white. Britney continued to say that her life had “come full circle” and implied that in the process she underwent changes in her soul and body, as shown in the video. It premiered on June 14, 2005 during the fifth and last episode of Britney’s reality TV show Britney & Kevin: Chaotic, titled “Veil of Secrecy”. The music video features a pregnant Brit lying in bed and walking around a house while singing to her unborn child.
Britney composed “Someday (I Will Understand)” on the piano at her house, two weeks before she learned of her pregnancy with her first child, Sean Preston. She explained the song came “like a prophecy… when you’re pregnant, you’re empowered.’ Britney wrote the entire track on her own and it is amazing!
‘It seemed very obvious what the song was about ”motherhood” but there was no physical sign that Britney was pregnant during the sessions,’ Sean McGhee (engineered, programmed, and mixed the song)wrote in an email ‘Certainly, we didn’t ask her any questions, I would not have wanted to pry into her personal life, but when the news came out a few weeks later, it wasn’t too much of a surprise.’
Like ‘Everytime,’ the ballad had been written by Britney at a piano and produced by Guy Sigworth, who has worked with Bjork and Madonna and was one half of the short-lived duo Frou Frou. McGhee said, ‘I think it’s actually very difficult lyrically to write something like ‘Someday’ without being mawkish,’ he said. ‘A lot of pop songwriters would really struggle to write about it in a sensitive and personal way, but Britney had written something really beautiful. Great melody, great lyrics, but still totally pop, and totally her. Much harder than it sounds.’ McGhee said he wasn’t told whether the song was to be a one-off single or part of a record. ‘If there was a larger context to it at the time, I wasn’t aware of it,’ he said, although he remembered ‘Mona Lisa was mentioned by one of her label executives as a departure for Britney from what she’d done before.’
‘Someday’ and a re-recorded and reworked ‘Mona Lisa’ both ended up on a 2005 EP that came with the DVD release of Chaotic. On the new ‘Mona Lisa,’ the line ‘cuz she’s gone’ became ‘she’s been cloned,’ and the second verse was rewritten to be even more prophetic: ‘Now see everyone’s watching / As she starts to fall / They want her to break down / And be a legend of a fall.’
Celebrate with us by watching the amazing video today!
Happy Birthday Someday! Do you think Sean Preston loves the song? How could he not?