Lorde and the kids back home
(Originally read aloud at Words and Guitars.)
You never forget about the people back home. Not just friends; everyone. All the same, when you turn 18, when you arrive on a new campus, there’s a sense of rebirth, the end of old associations. Those years of certainty, assigned hometown personhood, loosen and curl up at the edges. It’s invigorating to think you can be different, or at least, figure out who you are away from what you’ve learned. But then there’s also that need to prove that you’re new. People change when they’re 18, right? You can be better, stronger, prettier, cooler. You can show everyone you’ve changed. I was prodding at the construction of my own identity when I first heard Pure Heroine.
It was my freshman year of college, and I was sitting in a dorm room where I kept standing up from the bed to greet new people, not sure if shaking hands was something anyone did. I wasn’t listening to the song much. I was busy pulling my shirt down, then up; checking my crooked eyeliner in my phone screen reflection. Awkward, trying to assert some sort of self, be appealing. I was only 17 (one year older than Lorde). That night, I took a photo of my cup; a boy had marked it “The Magnificent Caitlin.”
Pure Heroine was that first college photo your old friends saw online: toothy, stomach sucked in, maybe red-Solo-cupped, something you hadn’t been before. The suggestion of something new. Its childhood dreaminess was abstract, yet utterly aspirational. The album was strong, but it was tenuous. Pure Heroine had a slow-walking feel, a creep forward. It claimed an identity without defining it.
Then, like nothing, four years passed. Four years of college for me, and four years between albums for her: the transformative period from 18 to 21 that doesn’t necessarily change a person, but lends to their change. Melodrama came out right after I graduated from college. But before that was the release of “Green Light” in March. At first, I balked at the distinct separations in the song’s sections, the production itself, but then I walked outside with the song playing on a loop, the soundtrack to a stomp through my campus, and I was in love.
When you graduate, what do you want the kids back home to think you’ve become? “Green Light” was that first peek in four years of who Ella, who Lorde, might have changed into — or, we always hope, found within herself. It was a regretful girl at a party, a recuperating lover, a common portrait of that stumbling, stupid early 20something. The construction of identity muddled by all of the college-aged conflicts. And then, a softer representation: she released “Liability,” a ballad of insecurity.
Lorde was showing her grown self off in pieces — the party girl, the girl anxious at home, the lover. Four singles gave slices of this new identity, or, rather, what she wanted to have become. But it’s a curious self-representation: She publicly admitted anxieties that live even on the dance floor. Admirably honest in range, the singles seemed stark contrasts of personality. In what person did “Green Light” go with “Liability”? Or, even more so, who could reconcile “Liability” with “Perfect Places”? Gone were jokes like “you bring me orange juice.” Lorde became literal, tactical, deliberate.
To call the four-year transition maturation is oversimplification. Melodrama has a lot that Pure Heroine lacks: namely, a sense of determined presence and place. But it lacks its predecessor’s wonder, replacing it with exploration and self-examination. There are drawbacks to aging your sound, just as there are drawbacks to aging up your clothes or pose in a photo. Once you un-Disneyfy yourself, once you pull up that peeling strip, you can’t be young again. That’s the terrifying part of re-releasing your identity.
And those slices of singles were disparate, sometimes unaffecting. But suddenly, when the album came out as a whole, every song made sense in its place. When all the personalities and places threaded together, I saw it. My apathy for “Liability” spun into empathy. Lorde captured the insecurities of our age and position: reckoning with adulthood and reality without quite confirming what it might be, acknowledging the short-sightedness of our nights. Her grasps at love and her self-assertion as a “Writer in the Dark,” were enticing. On the album, she came off as more secure than ever, and showed that through her anxieties. What’s more empowering than acknowledging those feelings? And more terrifying when you picture those friends back home? It’s far easier to paint the pretty picture; post the group photo rather than the written confessional.
Once you go off to college, even just when you graduate high school or turn 18, you want to show yourself changed, show yourself as the person you want to have changed into. No matter who Lorde really is now, she’s shown us the picture of who she imagines she might be.
In “Liability (Reprise),” she sings, “Maybe all this is the party / Maybe the tears and the highs we breathe.” In college, that’s how it felt. Now, in a moment of transition between college and a professional life, it’s how I look back and see myself, even with my limited perspective. But regardless of who we’ve become or who we’re trying to be, those highs and tears of the past four years made us into someone, and now that period of time is over: we’ve arrived.
(Bonus: Me as ultimate Lorde stan on Halloween in my sophomore year)
