2017’s Best Album

One of the things that makes music interesting is the infinite number of interpretations that can spill out of just one song. Before I delve into my own interpretation of Green Light, let me drop this video of Season 6, Episode 22 of New Girl, which is the moment that *spoiler* Nick and Jess finally get back together. In the background, Lorde’s Green Light plays and you can hear:

“I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it”

In this interpretation of Green Light, Nick and Jess haven’t gotten over each other. Their green light is not one of final closure from a relationship, it’s a green light to get back together. This was one of my favorite TV + music moments of the past year and I wanted to highlight it before delving into Lorde’s song to show the different meanings people can draw from the same songs at different stages or situations in their life.

For Lorde, this song is definitely not about getting back together. While talking to Vanity Fair in June of 2017 she said that, “Green Light is a breakup song. I’m putting all the interesting parts of my personal life into the work. All that’s left is what I’m cooking, what I’m wearing, what beach or store I may have gone to—so there’s less of a treasure-hunt effect of wanting to put the pieces [of my private life] together. I’m trying not to leave pieces in the drawer.”

And to Lorde, that’s what this track is. The start to a breakup from longtime boyfriend, James Lowe. Tough, messy and tangled up, she sings:

“Honey, I’ll come get my things but I can’t let go / I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it” 

The green light here has to be interpreted as a “go” on the breakup. At an intersection, there’s Lorde in a car, stuck between her past love and a future without him. She’s stopped on the red – wrestling with thoughts of him as she sings to bare piano chords and a rising background sound, swelling like anger:

“Thought you said that you would always be in love / But you’re not in love no more”

But there’s something else besides the anguish of a lost lover here. That angry swelling sound rises to a peak, dissipates immediately and clears out into an upbeat piano melody and thumping beat. It’s on this uptempo note that Lorde adds:

“But I hear sounds in my mind / Brand new sounds in my mind”

She’s on yellow here – this isn’t a song about wallowing in a break up she can’t shake, it’s about the transition from that phase to a green light, a final break, closure. This uptempo section here shows us Lorde’s going to get there, just give it a little more time. And Lorde knows this – it’s not going to be like a bandaid, and she immediately adds to the lyrics above:

“But, honey, I’ll be seeing you ‘ever I go / But, honey, I’ll be seeing you down every road / … / Oh, I wish I could get my things and just let go”

Yellow, yellow, yellow. Our girl’s stuck in between her past and her future and hanging onto the thread of boyfriend in between. We know she’ll get there in time but we have to sympathize with this feeling of in-between-ness that comes with the rupture of something once so important in our life. That in-between-ness that triggers you when a stranger smiles the way your ex did, or a laugh reminds you of him, or a croissant reminds you of that date you had at that terrible French cafe.

Lorde’s refrain goes on despite this and the song ends in it:

“I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it / I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it”

Yeah, she’s on yellow but eventually time will turn that light green. Hit the gas pedal, Lorde, and let’s get into her future and the rest of this album.

Live performance:

• Sober

When Lorde wrote these songs, she was in between the ages of 18-20. So let’s either fast forward to 19 or roll back the clock.

Hey look! There’s me first year at college, freshmaaaaan. Wait a second, Rachel, that’s shot #5, yikes. And Svedka?? Toss that shit out right now.

“Oh God, I’m closing my teeth / Around this liquor / Wet, midnight, lose my mind”

Okay, time to get out of this pregame in the dorm – let’s fast forward an hour.

11:30 pm, me killing it on the dance floor at some house party. Looks like my amazing dance moves have attracted a male. Nice work, Rach! Drunk, me and boy are on top of the world at this party – cue some low chords and a cool, smoky register, Lorde:

“King and queen of the weekend / Ain’t a pill that could touch our rush”

I’m up, up, up – friends are rolling by with giant smiles and loud “Hey Rachel’s!!”, there’s another cup in my hand and that boy’s kind of cute. Keep those horns loud and hit me with some bongos, Lorde:

“These are the games of the weekend / We pretend that we just don’t care / But we care”

Yeah, I’m dancing like I don’t care, right? I’m supposed to be partying, get off my back. These party friends? Do they know me like my friends back home? Nah, but I’m having a good time. That midterm in a week in that major I’m not sure about? Nah, not a big deal. Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.

“I know you’re feeling it too / Can we keep up with the ruse?”

Lorde knows it’s a ruse, but let’s keep up with it. Disco balls now too lighting up the Natty Light-soaked floor and a heavy-stomp beat, but it’s:

“Midnight, we’re fading / Till daylight, we’re jaded / We know that’s it over / In the morning, you’ll be dancing with all the heartache / And the treason / The fantasies of leaving”

And I just can’t get this thought out of my head:

“But what will we do when we’re sober?”

___

Dramatic rendition of a happy-sad Friday night of a 19 year old? Yeah, totally, but hey, this album’s called Melodrama for a reason.

Live performance:

• Homemade Dynamite

Before I get into this, I have to admit that every time I think of Homemade Dynamite, I think of homemade dividends. Thanks, undergraduate finance education! You are useful after all 🙂

Homemade Dynamite is a slick midtempo jam, chopped in pieces by a heavy, staccato beat, glued back together with expansive chords and brightened with blurry synths throughout. One of my favorite moments in this song comes at the 2:08 minute mark with a “boom” whispered by Lorde. Cheeky, cheeky. In this track, Lorde continues to explore the themes of a party, the frivolity of it all and that invincible sense of being able to just blow shit up that comes with being young.

“I’ll give you my best side, tell you all my best lies / Yeah, awesome, right?”

Let’s talk diction for a second. Lorde’s use of the word “awesome” here is a nod to her youth and the exaggerated highs of a party. Her best side is one of best lies, a front she puts on at the party. She presses forward:

“Might get your friend to drive / But he can hardly see, ooh / We’ll end up painted on the road / Red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling”

This verse is perhaps the most artistic way of portraying a drunk driving accident. Lorde sets the scene with red blood and chrome car parts, not smeared, not scattered but painted on the road with glass shards sparkling in between. This verse furthers the theme of recklessness in the track, young kids just blowing shit up with their decisions, and Lorde hits on this theme in the chorus a few more times to end the track.

Live performance:

• The Louvre

Ah, The Louvre.

This is one of my favorite songs on the album. It’s titled amazingly (am I biased towards French things? Sure), is well produced and is cleverly written. It opens with a subdued guitar, soft vocals and this personification of summer:

“Well, Summer slipped us / Underneath her tongue / Our days and nights are / Perfumed with obsession”

This song’s totally about the start to a new love, set in the warm haziness of summer.

“I am your sweetheart / Psychopathic crush”

And just like the rest of this album, there’s little gems left for us like this line:

“I overthink your p-punctuation use / Not my fault, just a thing that my mind do”

When I heard this line the first time, I couldn’t help but smile. One, the doubling up of the “p” sound is clever, a nod perhaps to those infamous dot dot dots our generation must decipher over text (or she just needed an extra syllable, but the first explanation is cooler). And two, boys’ punctuation use is maddening. Too many explanation marks and you wonder what he’s hiding, too many periods and maybe he’s angry, emojis instead of punctuation and he’s flirting, and lack of proper punctuation and we can’t date. I think it’s hilarious that our generation so over-thinks texts and love that Lorde – even if only briefly – touched on this.

Okay back to the song where Lorde is hitting us with some percussion after spending the first 30 seconds backed only by guitars.

“A rush at the beginning / I get caught up just for a minute”

She holds onto “rush” and “up” elongating them into “ruuUuuUush” and “uuuuUuuUup” and this is right where I feature myself on the track. The entire song is fun to sing to but this part is cathartic after the first soft 30 seconds, like a basketball game where you only cheer after your team’s made their first basket.

Lorde continues:

“But lover you’re the one to blame / All that you’re doing / Can you hear the violence? Megaphones in my chest / Broadcast the boom, boom, boom and make ’em all dance to it”

Lorde drags “megaphones” out and repeats the “broadcast” line here as backup vocals soar into the background, a different beat enters and the persistent bass continues. I love this metaphor of a megaphone as a heart, taking a microphone to your chest to hear it, and then making the beat that follows like that heart thumping, heavy and nervous from this ‘psychopathic crush’.

The crush develops through the song:

“Our thing progresses / I call and you come through / Blow all my friendships, to sit in hell with you / But we’re the greatest / They’ll hang us in the Louvre / Down the back / But who cares? Still the Louvre”

But who cares? Still the Louvre.

“Nothing wrong with it / Super natural / Just move in close to me, closer, you’ll feel it coasting”

Lorde, in a Spinoff Exlusive podcast, stated this about The Louvre: “I wanted to [give the feeling of] just like the big sun-soaked dumbness of falling in love and it’s like your whole head is like glue, it’s amazing. It is like drugs. It’s like ‘I just want to be by you all the time, I just want to listen to you talk and look at your face do all those dumb things that it does when you talk. It’s just like this big dumb joy and it’s intense – and I feel like the instrumentation in that song kind of helped it get there.”

Liability is a classic piano ballad, beautifully sung by Lorde. In it, she goes home alone, dances by herself and confesses to sometimes feeling like being too much for everyone. It’s the first track in the album where it feels like its just Lorde alone at home, not in a car, not at a party, not with a lover.

Choice lyrics for contemplation:

“They say, ‘You’re a little much for me’ / ‘You’re a liability’ / ‘You’re a little much for me'”

“The truth is I am a toy / That people enjoy ’till / All of the tricks don’t work anymore / And then they are bored of me”

Live performance:

• Hard Feelings/Loveless

This track is tied with Supercut as my current favorite of this album. It’s also a 2 for 1 basically, a mash of Hard Feelings and Loveless.

Hard Feelings/Loveless is a contemporary and grown-up track, both in its production and lyrics. It’s not the girl at the party from Sober taking shots and giving zero shits because of her breakup, it’s not the girl in the car from Green Light wrestling with the past, and it’s not the girl home alone from Liability sad and introspective.

No, this version of Lorde has come to terms. This is the song after the breakup song. She’s remembering the relationship:

“‘Cause I remember the rush when forever was us / Before all of the winds of regret and mistrust”

And that last time in his car, where she shut the door and walked away and it was never the same:

“Now we sit in your car and our love is a ghost / Well, I guess I should go / Yeah, I guess I should go”

We’re reminded of Lorde’s youth once more in the way she sings the next lines:

“Hard feelings / These are what they call hard feelings”

She states that these are what they call hard feelings, like she’s feeling it for the first time, this broken-heartedness. And then comes the verse containing my favorite line from the entire album:

“These days, we kiss and we keep busy / The waves come after midnight / I call from underwater / Why even try to get right? / When you’ve outgrown a lover / The whole world knows but you / It’s time to let go of this endless summer afternoon”

And then the track spins out into a dizzying array of dissonant industrial sounds, high pitched synths and electric guitars. This section, to me, literally sounds like heart break. It’s tormented and confused, spinning this way and that.

Lorde clears this section with a beautiful verse.

“For years, loved you every single day / Made me weak, it was real for me / Yeah, real for me / Now I’ll fake it every single day / Till I don’t need fantasy / Till I feel you leave / But I still remember everything / How we’d drift, buying groceries / How you’d dance for me / I’ll start letting go of little things / Till I’m so far away from you / Far away from you, yeah”

And so concludes, part one, Hard Feelings. Bring on part deux!

Loveless hits woozily after Hard Feelings with a prominent beat and Lorde in a higher register than normal. The title of it should give you an idea of what Lorde’s getting across here but if that wasn’t enough here’s a line:

“We’re L-O-V-E-L-E-S-S generation / L-O-V-E-L-E-S-S generation / All fuckin’ with our lovers’ heads”

Loveless is a jam in it of itself and so is Hard Feelings, together this song’s just a pleasure to listen to.

Sober II (Melodrama) follows up on the morning after Sober and is a case study in production and instrumentation. The strings lend it a soundtrack-quality suited for an Oscar-nominated drama. Drums hit hot out of nowhere at the 0:58 mark as the track makes its way up this dramatic mountain. Then the whole track opens up at the 1:33 mark with a slow tempo beat fitting for a conscious rap and at 1:46, there’s a cool guitar spin out. The track keeps going as the strings crescendo until their peak at around 2:08, where they resolve and the whole track moves into a decrescendo.

Live performance:

• Writer in the Dark

Writer in the Dark starts off with lyrics that make you wonder about fame’s effects on a relationship:

“(You) stood on my chest and kept me down / Hated hearing my name on the lips of a crowd”

I think this song shows off Lorde’s vocal ability perhaps the most of all the songs on the album. She hits the low and angry notes:

“Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark”

And also the delicate, painful, almost hysterical high notes:

“Now she’s gonna play and sing and lock you in her heart / … / I am my mother’s child / I love you till my breathing stops / I love you till you call the cops on me”

This song carries a theme of darkness throughout and you can feel the words coming out of a page written by Lorde late at night. It resolves with heavy orchestration and an echoing Lorde who spins the darkness into something positive:

“But in our darkest hours, I stumbled on a secret power / I found a way to be without you, babe”

Live performance:

• Supercut

What is a supercut? It seems simultaneously self-explanatory and yet not something part of our everyday vernacular. So I’ll define it here as those memories we store in our heads like video clips, but only the big ones, the highlights. Sometimes these hit you out of nowhere, sometimes they hit you when you visit your hometown, or your alma mater. You ever do that? Play yourself a supercut? Run back the start of that relationship or a performance you crushed. Those are fun supercuts. And then there’s the ones that haunt us. The end to that relationship or a performance where you missed a note or the game winning field goal, layup, whatever. Those suck. But our minds are cool and can change things sometimes. Change a few arguments in that relationship, hit the sharp instead of the flat, or lay the ball on the glass just a bit higher. And in the moment of a changed Supercut, you play it back with a different ending and it’s cool. And then it ends, and you’re left with what’s real.

In this song, Lorde replays a supercut of her past relationship. It’s nostalgic, high and low, and regretful at times.

The song opens to a quiet, uptempo piano, bass gets layered in around 0:16 and Lorde sings wistfully of her old relationship:

“All the magic we gave off / All the love we hadn’t lost / … / These visions never stop / … / But when I reach for you, there’s just a supercut”

In comes the beat at 0:32 and Lorde sings:

“In your car, the radio up / … / I’ll be your quiet afternoon crush / Be your violent overnight rush / Make you crazy over my touch”

Backup vocals come in here accenting “the radio up”, “quiet”, “violent and “crazy”. The last three lines roll together so smoothly with rhymes on “crush” & “rush” and a near rhyme on “touch” and the kick line dropping at the end of each line on “crush”, “rush”, and “touch”. This pre-chorus verse fits together like a perfect puzzle. After this relatively upbeat verse, Lorde’s – of course – gotta bring that high down with reality. She sings as the chorus melody gets introduced:

“But it’s just a supercut of us / Oh, it’s just a supercut of us”

What used to be a quiet afternoon crush, a violent overnight rush is now just a supercut. Lorde’s turning all these memories, all these scenes into her supercut. She even tinkers with the past – flips the script on some of the scenes, changing reality to perhaps what she wished she had done instead:

“In my head, I do everything right / When you call / I’ll forgive and not fight”

In comes my favorite verse again, but this time slightly different. There’s a funky, synth melody now scraping the lyrics at a lower pitch, letting up for rest when that kick line hits the final note of the measure – on “up”, “us” – and continuing on for “crush”, “rush” and “touch”. And then there’s bigger drums on this verse, boisterous as they introduce the chorus a second time.

At 2:21, Lorde brings us back to those “moments I play in the dark” and all production (sans piano) is stripped out except her voice as she sings in a more despairing tone this time around:

“In my head, I do everything right / When you call, I’ll forgive and not fight / All the moments I play in the dark / Wild and fluorescent, come home to my heart”

She rips this verse out with a frustrated scream and then a bass line picks us back up and drops us off at the same verse as before, but different now with the bass pumping. It repeats itself, with rounds gradually being laid into the verse the way you fold egg whites into waffle batter before the whole thing is waffle batter. I mean, hey, what’s better than Lorde singing? Multiple Lordes singing!

Supercut doesn’t really end per-se, it gives you a whole minute and a half to bask in the glory of what just elapsed in the 3 minutes prior as the music fades out, wobbling away until there’s nothing. It’s the wrinkles and nuances of the production, the lyrical realism, the imagery of a supercut and the way Lorde imbues emotion into the words that make this song great.

A reprise is a “repetition or further performance of something”. It comes from the French verb, reprendre, which means to take something up again. This is interesting because Liability (Reprise)’s storyline strikes me as the prequel rather than the sequel to Liability. More on that later.

Liability (Reprise) is the reprise to Liability (duh). But it’s much slower, with chords instead of the melodies that drove Liability. The beat in this song is similar in it’s ticking nature and rhythm to that in Tennis Court from Lorde’s first album, but with an entirely different flavor here than there.

When I listen to this song, I think of a girl who’s disconnecting at a party. She’s there dancing one second and then the next, she’s stepping away slowly, to the periphery of the room. And all this party nonsense is happening in the middle of the room, but she’s not there anymore. She’s feeling like a liability, like a toy whose tricks have been all played out and so she’s retreated to this corner, feeling small. And she’s thinking to herself:

“But you’re not what you thought you were”

The song ends on an almost-whimpered note:

“Leave”

And the girl slips out the front door.

_______

And if we track her, she’s probably going home now to dance in a room alone, the same girl from Liability.

Perfect Places is one of my favorites on the album. It’s Sober’s cousin, following a similar plot line as Lorde goes through “another graceless night”.

Those high’s and low’s we talked about before? Super prevalent here right out of the gates with the first line:

“Every night, I live and die / Feel the party to my bones”

I love this line here at 0:28:

“But when we’re dancing, I’m alright”

Not because of the lyrics but because of the piano that hugs Lorde’s vocal melody here, mimicking it as she goes up the scale. Lorde will repeat this once more in the song, spoiler: the second time I still love it. Following with her theme of youth and unabashed, conscious partying (a.k.a partying where you have those second thoughts in the back of your head), Lorde delivers lyrics like these:

“I’m 19 and I’m on fire / It’s just another graceless night / Are you lost enough? / Have another drink, get lost in us”

One of my favorite moments from this song is at the 0:58 mark where Lorde mimics the sound of a gun going off. It’s something that links this track to Homemade Dynamite, where in that song she had the whispered “boom”. Little things like these make these tracks all feel cohesive and part of the whole that is Melodrama. 

Lorde comes off the chorus with the following lines:

“Every night, I live and die / Meet somebody, take ’em home”

She sings these nonchalantly, her tone like “yeah, whatever”. And then comes:

“Let’s kiss and then take off our clothes”

With the piano hugging Lorde’s voice a second time in the song. These lines are interesting from the perspective of someone coming off a long-term relationship and then being swallowed back up into the world of hookups, one-night stands, ghosting and almost-maybe’s. It’s like Lorde fell off this cliff of legitimacy in terms of actual human connection to someone and is accepting it in a sort of “fuck it, that’s just the way it is” kind of way, falling back in line with the crowd and chalking it up to the status quo of youth.

She wraps the song up with these lines:

“All the nights spent off our faces / Tryin’ to find these perfect places / What the fuck are perfect places anyway?”

Yeah, what the fuck are perfect places anyways? Do they exist?