I realized recently that, I pretty much just write music about bodies… about what happens in your body when you feel something really intense… sounds about right, right?
On the first weekend of April 2022, I flew over to Nashville from Charlotte for the starting concert of Lorde’s first music tour since Covid. The Solar Power tour. However, I made this crazy one-day trip to Nashville to rewind her past album instead, the Melodrama. You see, I am a big lyrics guy. I care about lyrics and I always try to connect with them (which also means that much of the following is my personal interpretation). That’s probably why I am not a mainstream pop fan but a Stan for the 2010s Lorde, 2000s Coldplay, 1990s Oasis, and 1970s Queen because they write deep, personal, and resonating good lines.
Lorde says in her concert that she “pretty much just write[s] songs about bodies.” In her Melodrama album, her saying refers to the psychological and emotional side of the body, or more accurately, her introspection and mental projection. Her song Liability is an open confession of her own insecurity and self-doubt, and the showcase of her little mental echo room where those thoughts are reinforced–all depicted through her lyrical self-expression and third-person observation of herself. The Lourvre, on the opposite, is a blatant expression of self-confidence while the protagonist is in an obsessive and “psychopathic” relationship because “we’re the greatest, they’ll hang us in the Lourvre.” Supercut, a reminiscence of the past of “us”. Writer in the Dark, a warning to those who hurt her of what a “writer in the dark” can do in revenge. And Perfect Places, a perfect depiction of the disorientation and desperation of the new generation indulged in sensual pleasure searching for “perfect places” that don’t even might have existed–a loss of faith and self-indulgence.
Her new album, The Solar Power, has put much more focus on the experience of the physical body, which, however, made it sound cheap, cliché, and too commercialized. I personally feel that this is the fact of the industry. Too many pop musicians flood the audience with songs about the superficial side of the bodily experience, and comparatively those who genuinely dig into the equally important, emotional (not just love songs, of course)/spiritual side of the body. I want more Lorde.
