Twenty-two and 2017 weren’t easy for me. I graduated college, moved back home, started a new job, moved back out and started my graduate program full-time. It was A Lot. All those big milestones that forever bookmarked 22 brought along emotions I was finally being forced to deal with.
I can admit I’m not the best at handling my own emotions. I tend to avoid and be evasive about how and what I’m feeling. And that tends to leave me not living in the moment, truly feeling everything that comes with it. As I listened to Lorde’s newest album, Melodrama, I realized how important and fulfilling embracing emotions and therefore truly living in the moment can be.
Back when Pure Heroine was released, I connected to the quiet observer perspective Lorde wrote from. Both Lorde herself and the album’s ubiquitous single, “Royals,” toppled music charts for being the ‘weird girl’ and capturing the universal feeling of being on the outside looking in. Three months into 2017, Lorde released “Greenlight” as the first single off Melodrama, her follow-up album to Pure Heroine. It was a completely different tone and sound. Starting slow before becoming faster-paced and breathless, Lorde rushes through her feelings about restlessness and being tired of waiting to move on.
Lorde performs during the third day of the Southside festival on June 25, 2017 in Neuhausen, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Niedermueller/Redferns)
After four years of living on campus, walking by the same buildings and on the same pathways and through the same halls, it became hard not to feel restrained by the place I was so used to calling home. Lorde said in a Beats1 interview the song was about her first major heartbreak. For me, the song represented something else. Despite the obvious references to an ex-lover, the hook is universal: “I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it.” Waiting to leave, waiting to change, waiting to be ready for something new. With the piano melodies in the instrumentals and flushed-with-emotion lyrics, Lorde captured the frantic energy that comes with heartbreak and change and new beginnings/ endings.
Lorde performing on day three of Coachella 2017
Towards the middle and end of Melodrama, when things come crashing down, Lorde’s inner strength to pull through resonated a lot with me. Though my big ending was in a different context, an ending hurts just the same. Suddenly I went from having all my friends around me on a regular basis to never seeing them.
While that would typically happen over a winter or summer break, this was different. It was loud and unspoken that none of us knew when we would see each other again. Not like over a summer break, where at the end of the three and a half months we’d see each other at some point. That guarantee wasn’t there anymore. It was a similar position to four years ago, when we all were pretty much standing alone after our high school graduations. For me, this time around was different — a little more messy.
In “Liability,” Lorde writes about how she is forced to stand on her own and love herself. She’s realized no one else will be there for her like she is there for herself. Listening to Lorde wistfully realize she’ll have to be her own lover and dance with herself — even if all a stranger sees “is one girl swaying alone, stroking her cheek.” Her delicate vocals in this song, soft and often sorrowful, convey the moment of post-clarity with such a flush of emotion. It’s bitter, it’s sad, it’s content and it’s pained all at once. Lorde plays at each of these emotions with the song, a complete 180-degree spin from the album’s earlier songs, like the romantic and hopefulness of “The Louvre” and the carefree and happiness of “Homemade Dynamite.”
Something I want to improve on in 2018 is embracing my own emotions. A lot of the time I tend to run away from what and how I’m feeling; I’d rather avoid feeling anything. This way of handling events and emotions tends to dull both the bad and the good. It’s not a pick-and-choose kind of deal. Over the course of the last year I’ve come to realize that’s not how I want to live my life. Even though I feel better in the moment, running and avoiding problems, I miss out on things in the long run too. When I look back on the last year I don’t just want to think about how many times I wasn’t “in the moment.”
In “Supercut,” just like in “Liability,” Lorde plays off a multitude of emotions — this time both positive and negative. For me, the entire song is just an embrace of what she’d felt over a period of time. Reflecting on that time period in her life, she shifts from nostalgia to passion to sadness to regret to pleading. It’s an emotional teacup ride from start to finish, spinning from different emotions between each verse and chorus and refrain. Her ability to capture all those conflicting feelings and create almost a stream of consciousness in a song only shows how much of an incredible songwriter she is.
Mixed together using performances from Bowery Ballroom (6/16), Glastonbury Festival (6/23), Southside Festival (6/25), Roskilde Festival (6/30), and Open’er Festival (7/2). (YT/David Berger)
Lorde has said Melodrama is about a house party, about how in just moments you go from feeling pure ecstacy to feeling horrible looking in a bathroom mirror. Those highs and lows are what being alive and human is about. I’d been keeping myself to an even nothing, and missing out on the ups and downs that come with life.
So here’s to me, at 23, learning to embrace the moment.