This post is the second of three posts I’m writing about live music. You can read the first one here, and stay tuned for the last installment next week.
Every year, without fail, Lorde makes it into my Spotify Wrapped. Whether it’s through a single song (“Solar Power” in 2021) or as one of my most played artists (2017-2020), she has made an appearance in some way since Spotify Wrapped was first launched six years ago. This year, “Ribs” was #15 in my Top Songs of 2022 playlist. Number 15! In the year 2022!
Clearly, I have been a Lorde fan for a very long time. I cried when I listened to “Perfect Places” for the first time, and four years later, I cried when I listened to “Solar Power” for the first time. Lorde and I are similar in ages—in her music, I find that words and sounds are put to feelings I couldn’t articulate before.
Lorde has become the subject of many of our parasocial relationships, especially as she began escaping from the public eye in between album cycles. I watched, and at times participated in, an idolization of Lorde. In the years after Melodrama and before Solar Power, there were endless tweets and Tik Toks begging for her to return, to drop new music to save us, to save the music industry, to provide some sort of release from the situation that was quarantine and the pandemic. Of course during a global catastrophe, it was natural for us to look to someone who would help us make sense of it all. We latched onto a familiar artist who made music about familiar situations—Pure Heroine and the feeling of loneliness and isolation in our teenage years, Melodrama and the exploration and acceptance of solitude.
Then, Solar Power dropped. In the opening track, “The Path,” Lorde sings, “Now if you’re looking for a savior, well, that’s not me / You need someone to take your pain for you? / Well, that’s not me.” And this illusion crumbled.
I’ll be honest, I think we were all a little too hard on Solar Power when the album first dropped. Our expectations were high, almost too high for any artist to really live up to. And as Lorde suggests in that line, she rejects this pedestal that she’s been put on and brings herself down to the same level as her listeners, continuing to sing, “‘Cause we are all broken and sad / Where are the dreams that we had?” She’s confused and processing, just like the rest of us.
In many ways, I feel like I’ve grown up with Lorde’s music. In high school, I would listen to “A World Alone” on repeat while sitting by myself. I closed out my last college radio show with “Perfect Places,” accompanied with a spiel about the bittersweetness of graduating.
When I saw Lorde live for the first time this year on her Solar Power Tour, there was something special about watching her perform songs of angst, years removed from the situation itself. We were now coming from the perspective of adults processing our past, rather than teenagers experiencing it all first-hand. It felt intimate and light-hearted, like we were given the chance to look back at our past selves and at our memories and feelings, but with a sense of closure that only time could really bring. It felt healing.
During one of her tour stops this year (Chicago, not New York, though I wish it was), Lorde addresses the notorious “Writer in the Dark” video, where during her Melodrama Tour in 2018, she’s seen to be shushing the crowd as she sings the ballad acapella. Reflecting back on that moment in 2022, Lorde talks about how her shows are a very communal place and she feels that the clip was taken out of context when it went viral to an outside audience—but she also admits that she was indeed 19 and very dramatic. She says that for a moment, she was disappointed at being misunderstood, but the moment passes when she realizes that she’s now in a room, on a tour, full of people who understand her. And in a reclaiming of that clip, Lorde invites the crowd to sing along, as she performs “Writer in the Dark” for the first time since that last tour.
That’s how the entirety of the concert felt to me. Hearing these songs that hold memories, good and bad, and being able to look back on them, breathe them in, and set them free.
There are three moments from that show that stick with me the most. The first, hearing “The Path” live and screaming along to, “‘Cause we are all broken and sad / Where are the dreams that we had? / Can’t find the dreams that we had … Let’s hope the sun will show us the path.”
The second, during “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” after Lorde sang the line, “‘Cause all the music you loved at 16 you’ll grow out of,” my friend turned to me and was like “Not us!” And then she proceeded to watch me burst into tears at that lyric.
The third, and my favorite, the preface that Lorde gives before performing “Ribs.”
“Ribs” is my favorite song, the one I was most excited to see live, and oddly felt the most pressure about hearing live because I’ll never get that moment again, of hearing this song for the first time ever in person. In her little preface to the song, Lorde says, “I wrote this song when I was 15, which means some of you have been listening to this for almost ten years. I want you to dance for your 15-year-old self.”
That moment felt like a release. We sang the lyric, “And I’ve never felt more alone / it feels so scary getting old” with new meaning, having expanded context of the world.
And we danced for our 15-year-old selves.
Some recs:
Thank you for reading! This is the second of three posts about live music—read the first post here, and stay tuned for the last post next week, where I finally talk about K-pop (finally!!!).
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