Lorde's Green Light

I'm posting this again 8 years later

I just heard that Lorde is teasing new music and at the same time I was thinking that it would be nice to post something positive after that last bummersville “The Evil…” piece from yesterday. In 2017 I was asked to write something when Lorde was about to release her second album and this is what I came up with. It was posted elsewhere but here it is again and maybe some of you will be seeing it for the first time. Here it is:

LORDE “GREEN LIGHT”

I am one of the eight or nine people on earth who never paid any attention to Lorde until now. I might’ve encountered little bits of “Royals”, in passing, while flipping through the radio dial but the song never grabbed me so I never stopped to listen to the whole thing; what I heard sounded kind of cold, empty, sparse. I loved what the song was saying but I didn’t like the production.

“Green Light” is my first proper introduction to Lorde and regardless of how the current Lorde compares to the original Lorde, I am really pleased to finally meet her.

At first, her voice is earthy, low, and a little dry around the edges; kind of animal but in total control. She teases the words out with a gorgeous, confident ease. She doesn’t oversell it. She doesn’t have to—it’s immediately clear she knows as well as anyone how to do this smart catchy pop song thing to perfection, starting with a stark verse and gradually adding rhythm and tension and then hanging back again to let the chorus ride the wave the song has caught.

“I’m waiting for it…that green light..I want it” : it’s what everyone who is listening to the song is thinking. We’re all waiting for the chorus to break and crash like that wave, drenching us pleasure—warm where “Royals” was cool (IMHO)—and universal truth.

I always want music to be a tangible thing that I can wrap my actual arms around (I have hugged my boom box before) but it isn’t. I want what I can’t have. I want to sink my teeth into the sound of that rich, strong, supple, honest voice. I want to drink and drink and gulp it down and that is the magic of a well-built and -performed and -recorded pop song. You get filled up, and sometimes you overflow with cleansing tears and cathartic shouting-along, if only temporarily, until the song is over, and then you play it again. It’s like a drug or a sugar rush. “Green Light” is ear candy.

I’m a sugar addict. Since childhood I couldn’t get enough. My best friend (also an addict) and I would walk the half mile from school to Barney’s gas station and go inside where the cash register and the bins of penny candy were and we’d fill up each of our little brown paper bags with mary jane’s and root beer barrels and bit o’ honeys and atomic fire balls (we called them hotballs), etc, and we’d pay and then leave, excited, jonesing so hard, and we’d go find some place to sit down and gorge until we were sated and our brain chemistry sufficiently altered, buzzing, feeling huge relief and a little guilt for enjoying something so much.

I’ve listened to “Green Light” a bunch of times and I still want more of it. I’m strung out on the melody, the chorus hook, the piano figures, the feelings all of it makes me feel, all the things she is describing that I recognize; that I know.

Lorde is young enough to be my daughter and I am old enough to be her mother but I want to learn what she knows. I want her to teach me how to sing, how to sing like what I am singing is important, how to believe that what I am saying matters, that my feelings matter. Because inside part of me is still the shy, insecure, ultra-sensitive girl with the small voice who thinks she takes up too much space, filled with doubt about everything.

There is no doubt in Lorde’s voice. Lorde, with her big eyes spaced far apart like an alien creature with higher intelligence, knows exactly what she is doing. A lot has been made of her musical precociousness and her general maturity and reserve and restraint. “Royals” was in fact too restrained for me. But going back and listening to it now I can see that this is a person who came on the scene at sixteen fully formed as an artist. It’s kind of miraculous.

In “Green Light” she is stuck in between the past and the future. She has been knocked off track by heartbreak. There is an awareness and an acceptance that this state is temporary; she is ready but not sure how to move forward but so certain that she will get there that this purgatorial zone seems totally okay, and even exciting, celebratory.

In the video for “Green Light” Lorde’s body is moving—she makes it move—down the street, in front of the mirror, in and out of and on top of the car; bending, twisting, flailing away, forward, upward like a drunk singalong chorus, her body loosening up in the way that she knows her busted, stalled engine of a heart soon will again.

How did Lorde get so smart? How does she, at twenty, know that “this too shall pass”? (That could be the song’s subtitle.) Twenty-year-olds are supposed to believe that they are literally. dying. of. heartbreak.

She’s not wallowing in her hurt and anger. She’s looking at it, assessing the damage, getting it on the record. These are the first steps. Her strong mind is willing her heart to heal. Trusting and believing in the natural, fateful order of things. It’s as if Lorde, all of twenty, has had twenty years of therapy.