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As the 2:00 pm deadline (11:00 am for me on the West Coast) hit, I was refreshing www.imwaitingforit.com eagerly in anticipation. When my efforts were finally rewarded with a new music video, I quickly tweeted Lorde. She had expressed how nervous she was to release new music and to be thrust back into the spotlight. I hurriedly wrote “@lorde don’t worry I’m six seconds in and this is already good.” I had breathed a sigh of relief. Then to my astonishment, the song changed. From characteristically dark vocals over a piano ballad emerged bright guitar, a joyous alt-pop anthem that already instinctively sounded like a song of summer.
Before “Green Light”, Lorde’s most recent single was released in 2014. “Yellow Flicker Beat” continued to embody what we have come to expect from Lorde. Something moody, vaguely dark, and so alternative that it could accidentally be mistaken for a rock song. Lorde has promised an album this year, a sentiment she officially released through a letter on her birthday.
Lorde wrote, according to an article published by the Guardian, “Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory, putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies, and this record – well, this one is about what comes next.”
She’s been dropping hints about new music for over a year, so to say this was highly anticipated would be an understatement. In her letter, though she wrote about music, she mostly spoke about aging. Being a teenager was something significant for her. She had always idolized teens and turning twenty represented leaving something behind.
As her twentieth birthday approached, she made the “very deliberate choice” to withdraw from being a celebrity. She chose to remove herself from being a public figure. She allowed it to be a year of self-reflection and a time spent with family and friends to better connect with herself and her music.
I’m reminded of Adele who has said, among complaints of her disdain for performing, that she doesn’t want to lead the typical celebrity life because it will take away the relatability of her music.
For me, that has always been one thing that stood out about Pure Heroine. Lorde and I are the same age. She rushed onto the music scene when we were both sixteen. Though I knew very little about her personally, her music spoke to me on a level that transcended the time, distance, and space between us. Despite my dismay at her continued presence in Taylor Swift’s squad, I saw her as my friend.
I have never been a music person and doubt that in my life I will ever claim to be. I rarely seek out new music, only recently started actively using Spotify and typically play the same few songs over and over on repeat. I still listen to much of the same music that I listened to four years ago (yes, including Pure Heroine). I have no claim of authority to review music, other than how deeply and personally I’ve connected with Lorde’s songs.
There were moments, whether it was “I’m kind of older than I was when I revelled without a care” or “go drown the colors of our mind and watch the cars go,” that there was something in her lyrics that perfectly encapsulated for me what it meant to be a teenager. I carried these moments with me as I entered college. Her words shielded me. No matter how much “hanging out with the wicked kids” started to claw away at me, she made me feel like I wasn’t alone.
I don’t attempt to make any claims about my maturity, but I do believe I’ve seen a shift in myself over the past two years as I’ve exited that stage of my life. I’ve attempted to shed layers of doubt that built up over my adolescence and free myself of the insecurities so innately tied to girlhood. I’ve tried to let go.
“Green Light” was unexpected. It seemed to layer several songs, one on top of the other to form something uncharacteristically optimistic, against the odds of the beginning of the song. Perhaps this song was an anthem to Lorde herself, signaling the go ahead to move forward, to not be held back by the past and to do anything she pleases. Perhaps I’ll afford myself the same permission.