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girlsbtrs · 3 years

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Growing Up One Step Behind Lorde

Written By Lila Danielsen Wong. Graphic by Paula Nicole.

It’s late July of 2015. It’s a little past two a.m. and I’m in the basement of my parents house. My parents left me home alone for a night, so I did what any newly 16-year-old would do; I got a bottle of cheap vodka from someone’s older brother and threw my very first small party. Two of my closest friends are sleeping inches away. Out of my cheap drugstore headphones come a slow synth build, sounding distant and underwater. It erupts into a pulse, just too fast to be a heartbeat. Lorde’s “Ribs” pushes on in all its teenage glory. “Mom and Dad let me stay home,” she tells me before confiding “it drives you crazy getting old.” In the next pre-chorus this morphs into the more tender, “I’ve never felt more alone, it feels so scary getting old.”

Before a live performance of “Ribs” in 2014, barely 18-year-old Lorde tells the audience that she wrote this song about a big party she had when her parents left town when she was 16. She was with her best friend afterwards at 4 a.m. unsuccessfully trying to go to sleep. He asked her what was wrong, and she said, regarding the party, “There’s something really crazy about throwing a party like this and doing something this huge. It feels grown up, and it feels like a rite of passage, and that's cool. It's cool to do stuff for the first time, but it also really freaks me out because once you do something that feels grown up it's really hard to come back, and if you've only ever been a kid the thought of having to be an adult is really terrifying.”

Three years after Lorde had this conversation with her friend, I’m sitting in my own basement all the way across the world after my own party listening to that very song and letting every word vibrate through my entire self. It feels so scary getting old, but hearing a girl from suburban New Zealand say exactly what I was thinking makes me feel a little bit less “so alone.”

In 2013, Ella Yelich O’Connor wrote an EP called The Love Club with local musician Joel Little and put it on Soundcloud under the name Lorde. To the surprise of both of them, it blew up. After collecting 60,000 downloads, UMG released it commercially and it managed to hit the charts in New Zealand and Australia. However, it was the release of “Royals” as a radio single that put Lorde on the international radar.

“Royals” was penned as a sort of wry defiance to celebrity culture and a call out to it’s disconnect from the general public. She noticed that many popular musicians based their clout on trashing hotel rooms and diamond watches, and this was so removed from her and her friends, at a house party not knowing if they would get a ride home. “Royals” and The Love Club EP were followed by Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine, a collection of songs about “the feeling of being [her] age” and “the weird social issues that come with being a teenager.”

After her global success made her visible worldwide, those who would be attracted to listen beyond “Royals” and become fans were fellow teens at fellow parties who also were “counting dollars on the train to the party”.

In 2017, Lorde released Melodrama. If Pure Heroine is about what it’s like to be a teenager, Melodrama captures life as a fledgling adult. Lorde has said that Melodrama is an album about a break up. She also has called it a concept album about a house party, telling The New York Times “it’s a record about being alone. The good parts and the bad parts.”

This release coincided with my high school graduation. It was the soundtrack of my final months of childhood and what I listened to through the transition to the next phase of life.

I spent my first year after high school in my hometown. I remember sitting in my house in September after all my friends had left for college and listening to “Liability”. My parents had left for a weekend trip and I was home alone, this time with no one to invite over. “Liability” is the second single from Melodrama. It’s a stripped piano ballad about the depths of insecurity, driving people away until you find yourself startlingly alone. “Every perfect summer’s eating me alive until you’re gone,” she sings; getting older comes stark changes in social circles and lifestyles, some of which can leave periods of time in which you find yourself startlingly alone.

I related to these feelings of disconnect and isolation and felt the song intimately just as I had felt “Ribs” two years earlier. Whereas the loneliness in “Ribs“ was the feeling of distance from everything you know when you’re on the cusp of adulthood; this loneliness comes from the other side of this cusp, when you look up and everything has changed. Melodrama ushered me into adulthood, and Lorde was like a voice from the future reassuring me that this was normal. If two years ahead of me Lorde the international star was sitting in a taxi feeling the exact same way I was feeling, then perhaps this happens to everyone and is just part of growing up.

The following summer, after a party I helped someone else host, I put on “Ribs” before I went to bed and was surprised to find that it didn’t “vibrate through my entire self” anymore. That stage of coming of age had come and gone for me.

The parties in Melodrama had grown up too; we’re no longer worried about getting caught by our parents. “Green Light,” the lead single, Lorde described as a song about the girl at the party who is a crying mess but doesn't seem to care. “Sober” asks about the morning after; “But what will we do when we’re sober?” “Liability” is looking in the mirror and not feeling so great about who you are and where you are. Growing up is reframed as self-discovery, mainly through the common young adult experience of a house party.

Sometimes, this is where I lose her.

In “Sober II” she cites the “glamour and the trauma,” and my life is nowhere near “glamourous”. The desperate feverishness of these more grown up parties of Melodrama are not what my life looked like. At the end of the day, I was reminded that she’s a pop star who already has her life financially set for her, and I was a college student with a limited social life and a whole lot of homework.

I wonder if I am just ready for the next album to usher me into the next phase of my life, or if this is this where our paths diverge.

Although the reception of “Solar Power” has been relatively positive, some fans noticed that the new single was missing some of the, well, angst of her previous catalogue. This is especially striking because for a lot of us this year has been somewhere on the spectrum of angsty to agonizing. Her most recent release, “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” ponders the nature of being settled. This second release contextualized not only “Solar Power,” but also why some fans may be feeling a little disconnected from her newest era. I listen to Lorde talk about how she loves her quiet, stable life, with “the vine hangin' over the door, and the dog who comes when [she] calls” from the corner of my sublet of someone’s living room, which I rent as I apply for yet another job that isn’t really hiring because of covid or is going to be taken by one of the millions of 2020 and 2021 graduates who got a serious delay on their quest for the peace and stability Lorde is talking about. This is not to say that me or any of her other listeners won’t relate to her new music, especially as she sprinkles in lines such “as all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of”, but it’s still up in the air whether or not the fact that she is a wealthy pop singer from New Zealand will finally effect her ability to “vibrate souls” of her younger fan base like she once did.

Lorde’s fanbase is just enough younger than her that, so far, once she has written an album about whatever phase of life she just went through, they are on the cusp of experiencing it. Teenagers are known for their “no one understands me” angst, and growing up one step behind Lorde reminded me how deeply universal the feelings and experiences that came with growing up are. Whether it’s coming from a teenage girl from suburban New Zealand (who must have been way cooler than me because her first party topped mine by about 100 more people) or a full blown star crying in a New York taxi, Lorde captured the most intimate moments of youth, offered them as a preview of the next age to her young fan base, and gently reassured them that these glimpses of fear and loneliness are perhaps what unites us as humans who are slowly but somehow rapidly getting older. However, how much longer will her experiences be this universal? As an artist whose fan base is largely built around her ability to connect and relate, will she be able to maintain this intimate connection as her life looks significantly different from most of the people she entertains? Perhaps the appeal of the Solar Power era will be more in the preview of the growing security of your mid-late twenties. Perhaps none of the differences of her lifestyle and her fan base will matter, because she will continue doing what she does best, stripping memories down to their universal truths, and feeding them back to a slightly younger generation with just a bit of dramatic lighting.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorde

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88oR5GjjZ6k

https://genius.com/Lorde-royals-lyrics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2013/10/24/5-things-to-know-about-lorde/?utm_term=.1072aea0ec9c

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/magazine/the-return-of-lorde.html

https://www.thenation.com/article/lorde-grows-up/

#lila danielsen wong

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