I think about how the teen years have a uniqueness to them. How they embody a specific storm of nostalgia and longing in them. But it is so difficult to guess what that longing is for; either the future or the past.
I remember listening to Lorde’s first album during this time; it is a meditation on that insular world of teendom, its innocence, its search for the self. And of course, its beauty.
Like most people, the first Lorde song I ever heard is Royals [presently I am sick of it though ha-ha].
I saw the music video on TV, on one of those afternoons when MTV base was just playing in the background. I didn’t think much about it; a pale young woman sitting in a chair, singing, with waves of hair falling down her shoulders. I would hear my friends sing snatches of the song in school, and still, the song – Lorde’s music - didn’t strike me at all.
Until maybe a year later, when I started Uni.
The first or second year of University was a particularly lonely time for me. I was in a new city, a new world really, and I did not have any of the things I was used to around me. It felt like I was lost in a way.
I think now about what being that age is like, and also, about how a lot of our identity is anchored by the things we are used to – like the people we know and how easy it is to relate to them based on the things we already understand and share about each other.
Or how familiarity, home, is like the places we go to, the places we know and how much of a blessing their predictable nature becomes. And also, how we ourselves fit into the world that we are already familiar with. How we do not need to question it, or to question ourselves about how we move in these worlds.
All of that was snatched away, or faded away when I very reluctantly moved to Ondo for University.
I had no choice, the familiar was gone. So, I needed to build up a new world that I could fit into.
BRAVADO
All my life, I’ve been fighting a war
I wonder how many people have ever felt that way; like a song was able to articulate a thing you wanted to say, but never found the words for. Many songs on Lorde’s first album felt that way for me, and more.
In the first few months after my move to the new city, I formed a routine where I scrubbed up my dorm room from top to bottom every Saturday. It took me only an hour or two in the mornings, and I found it to be a way to reset myself after a long week, or a boring week.
And I would play music.
I am not sure why, but all of the music I played might be where I developed that habit of listening to whole albums, instead of random singles like I did before.
It might also be when my taste in music radically shifted.
Before this time, I was a lover of Afrobeats. I enjoyed the mindless lyricism, the upbeat tempo and vocals. I enjoyed how much it endeared me to my friends when we would belt out the latest hit.
But then, there were no friends, I hadn’t really made any proper ones by them. So I naturally gravitated towards the music of broody, lonely people. Ha-ha.
But really, before Lorde’s Pure Heroine, I had never really considered the idea that music could help you examine the world you live in, or how it could be a sort of companion to you. I related heavily with the dreamy-tuned lyrics of White Teeth Teens. Of examining your own social world as a sort of wry outsider.
And of course, secretly, my favourite song was Bravado. I feel no fear now in admitting that I needed a little bit of – or a lot of - courage to come out of my shell then. To be less cautious about getting to know more people, or working towards a goal I had in mind.
But the most precious thing that album gave me was a safe harbour on some of the hardest days of my life. I am not sure why, but the combination of a stressful schoolwork load, of misunderstanding and being misunderstood by others, and just the general out-of-placeness that I felt, all of it was made easier, lighter by hitting play on my favourite album.
Listening to the now-familiar world in those songs. And how it gave me a hope, and courage, that I am still grateful for today. It is probably during this time that I realized this recurring truth that art can point us beyond itself.
When I was able to ask that question; where is your hope. And have a coherent answer, one that stood despite it all.
WRITER IN THE DARK
I got the news that Lorde’s second album was out on a late evening in 2017.
I had felt like I waited too long {all of Lorde’s albums feel like this, by the way].
But the wait was finally over. The first song of the album was released as a single. And it was such a massive shift from what I had grown to expect from Lorde.
I did not like it at first, and truly, for a long time I was upset about the album.
I had been waiting for the continuation of that world I had grown and loved in Pure Heroine, and I was given something that I was not used to. Something I was not sure I wanted, or could relate to at that time.
Something I did not even get until, maybe just last year ha-ha.
What I know about the second album Melodrama, is that it is an examination of heartbreak, set in the world of a house party.
Partying to escape the pain perhaps? Ha-ha.
Really, it had all of the usual undertones of self-reflection typical to Lorde, but I just did not get it. I would listen to it, and the lyrics would seem out of my scope of experience. Some of the themes on the album were in the ballpark of what I could relate to, but they just weren’t done in the way that I would experience them. They were not the feelings that I would have.
During this time, I was in that odd post-adolescent time when your identity is not as confusing to you as it was before; you have lived, loved and known, but you are still well, solidifying things. Letting go of some things that just don’t serve you anymore.
I could have done that then you know, thrown out the album from my music player and be done with it. But I am not sure. I had developed a kinship with the first album that I believed to be rare. I wanted to hold on.
THE PATH… BACK?
Couldn’t wait to turn fifteen
Then you blink and it has been ten years.
[Music video illustrates the changes over the three albums]
It isn’t ten years… yet.
But it definitely felt like it was ten years before the third album came out.
We [the fans] were tired.
It took at four years. But then the album came out, and it was… different. Trust this artist to go in a different angle, always. Switching from a more electric pop to an album that can fairly be described as acoustic with a touch of pop.
The third album met me at a place in my life when, I had already started writing on this blog to you, dear reader. I was grown. Happier, in a very calm place. I loved laying on my back in the afternoon, dozing off into a light sleep. I had embraced my love for ice-cream fully, and proudly. I had quite a number of good friends.
The pandemic was over on my side of the world, mostly. I had come out of the chaotic years, and there I was, safely at shore, realizing I had made it through the storm.
It is interesting that Lorde made an album to fit this specific theme.
I read somewhere on twitter, just a random tweet, about a poet who written all of the trauma-infused poems they care for and were basically writing what they termed domestic lit. Well, I want to borrow that term.
Lorde made some great domestic pop. It is an easy album to listen to. Once you realize it is not something that wants to have a lot of big moments.
It is quiet, gently reflective, and seems to be very forgiving and accepting of all of the chaos of the younger years. But going further than that and just choosing a very specific calmness.
I loved this one in particular. The music video is just the epitome of a lazy day spent relaxing and recharging… at the beach preferably.
I think that this artist’s discography – Lorde’s - is a testament to how music can help us, hold our hand through our lives; through the scary moments, the doubts, and hopefully, as we find the right path home.
For me, I think it has taught me to not put a cap on the kind of person I can be, the kind of interests that I can have. I mean, look at the range between the first and the third albums, and me listening to all of them.
Even more, me belting out the songs of Melodrama in the mornings when I wake up nowadays. I figured this out; sometimes there is no big lesson to a thing. Just get up and dance. Live. Enjoy the world you have, and that you live in, now. That is, gratefully, where I am at.
Not everyone will like Lorde’s music, or will even get it.
But I do hope you have some artist who has been there for you over years and years, and as always, I’d like to learn about them. I’d be happy to join your own party too. Ha-ha.
Take care.