Music with Meaning: Suspicious Package’s Bio-Pop Hit

Pop music is rife with songs about love lost, love found, and even paparazzi, but one topic that tunes don't usually take on is biodiversity. That’s something that Ashlynn Manning and Emily Doubilet, the duo who make up the group Suspicious Package, are hoping to change with Bio-Pop: biodiversity focused entertainment, music, and videos.

 

“With the pop aesthetic we wanted to do something more nutritional, not hit people over the head with a message that you must do this or that, but help to make a connection with nature with an internalized and personal source of that feeling you get when you hear your favorite song,” says Emily Doubilet, the daughter of renown underwater photographers Anne and David Doubilet.

 

Their first video, Hummingbird, was filmed on an island off the coast of Honduras, where they spent months living in a nature preserve. (Read more about hummingbirds here.) Doubilet found the atmosphere inspiring. “The imagery is one thing that Ashlynn and I talked about for a long time,” she says. They came up with a term for that, too: nature bling. “What about the gold that sparkles on the beach? That’s some major bling. Or the beauty of nature, you can’t top that, it’s seriously blinging,” she says. That magnificence is what they want to highlight.

 

As a child, Doubilet had the chance to travel all over the world with her parents, so she quickly developed an appreciation for the environment. When she wasn’t in some exotic locale like Palau, she was in New York City, where she also discovered her love of performing. “From dancing to theater—all performing arts—they just made me feel so happy, and so did floating out in the ocean,” she says.

 

Suspicious Package allows her and Manning, who feels just as passionately about the environment, says Doubilet, to “combine my environmental ethic with my performance aesthetic, the things that make me feel alive.”

 

The group, while working with visual director Bad Brilliance, is completing seven more videos that feature animals like bees, elephants, and birds of prey. Doubilet wanted to make sure that in addition to working with exotic fauna in remote oases that they also incorporated wildlife that someone could encounter in a park or a garden: “It’s really about being able to stop and notice the beauty around you wherever you are.”