I hate the winter. I’ve learned in my life to process hardship and treat it as temporary, just as you should with the better times. It is fair to acknowledge the negative swing of the pendulum, and take enough time to heal before progressing.
Lorde is an artist whom I can comfortably say I have enjoyed since the beginning. When I first learned of her, there was not much content to enjoy; just a few songs existed on youtube (before the era of streaming services) and I watched them repeatedly, learning “Royals” and “The Love Club” long before she would become a polarizing smash hit with disgruntled youth globally. I remember persistently shoving those videos in the faces of friends, coworkers and other students at my university. I was passionate about this new figure in the music community, and wanted everyone around me to feel as good as I did when I listened to her.
Something about her old soul, her disinterest in the music industry and its temporary rewards, and the way she embraced her quirks made her immeasurably favorable. I rooted for her as hard as I could and wanted the world to know what kind of force had just entered the realm of music. Lily Allen famously said “Lorde smells blood, yeah, she’s about to slay you. Kid aint one to fuck with when she’s only on her debut” in her track Sheezus, reflecting on the meteoric impact at which Lorde hit the scene.
I placed my bets early and waited for her debt album to land. I knew in my bones that it would be everything that I had hoped for, and more. I told my peers “watch and see. This is going to be good!”
When her debut album “Pure Heroine” was upon us, she scheduled a number of concerts, and I nabbed a ticket with feverish excitement. I would finally get to behold this young champion from the middle of New Zealand and taste the energy that she’d been purveying for so many months at this point.
As we all learn in fragmented intervals, life happens fast. In the weeks leading to the concert that I so enthusiastically looked forward to, I was the passenger in a car accident. My friend’s brand new sports car collided at 85 miles per hour with an abandoned vehicle on a dark freeway in the AM hours. He, ironically, was playing tracks from “Pure Heroine” at my request. I broke both feet and ankles, but was thankfully okay otherwise. I remember the doctor who checked in on me in the emergency room saying “oh, you guys crashed into a parked car? Yeah, that happens a lot. I’m glad you survived.”
Needless to say, I had to miss that concert. I didn’t get to see Lorde live until Coachella 2014, and I’m comfortable saying that she was most of the reason that I attended.
Cut to Solar Power. The title track to this album arrived with much welcome in the core of the Covid era. There wasn’t much to celebrate, and few things provided cause for joy. I personally knew a few people who passed away, or lost pets, or were fired during this time. I totaled 2 cars, was broken up with and altogether felt like I was caught in a riptide or a tumbleweed. I needed relief more than I could say.
I remember the first time Lorde performed the title track on “Good Morning America” and I woke up early for the occasion. I wasn’t sure how or when I’d get to be among strangers and dance again, but it was important for me to pretend that this reality could be.
When Lorde announced a handful of tour dates including the Shrine Auditorium in LA, I nabbed a pit ticket as fast as I could. It was an impossible feat. The tickets could not be resold or transferred, and required the original purchaser to claim them with proof of ID the day of the show.
I waited the many months between that moment of success and the actual show, and felt more of the worlds’ turmoil, bit by bit, but I kept my eye on the prize just as I always have with Lorde.
The day of the concert, I left work a bit early after reflecting all day on how I would feel and react. I knew I’d crumble, feeling incredible catharsis during “Solar Power,” thinking about the people we’d lost, the failures I’d endured and how I had survived it all, just like everyone else in attendance. The pivotal line ran through my head repeatedly: “forget all of the tears that you’ve cried, it’s over.” It served to acknowledge all of the pain I’d felt, and guided me in letting it go.
I arrived plenty early and enjoyed Remi Wolf’s opening set. I drank in the beginning but stopped before securing my place in the small pit crowd set in front of the theater seating behind. I felt incredibly lucky, and grateful.
Lorde came out and thanked us all for attending, noting that she had no guest list for the show because she didn’t want the crowd to be made up of influencers and celebrities. “I know you are all my people” she said, and we all cheered in unison. Much of the crowd was made up of USC students, being that it was a show held on campus. I felt like a veteran concertgoer, but knew that the emotions Lorde evoked would strike us all the same.
She rolled through tracks from her most recent album, but touched upon favorites from Melodrama and her earliest work. She paused for a moment to acknowledge that “people are trying to tell us that our bodies aren’t ours” and stated that she didn’t have the words yet to address this properly. She encouraged us to take much needed moments of pause when confronting issues as this, and then re-engaging.
She finally arrived at a moment where she sat midway on the fabricated staircase that rotated throughout her set, and spoke of a song that she wrote with the intention of bottling the best sunshiny days for reference even in the cold weather and hardest times of existence. She foraged past a moment of pause, and performed “Solar Power.” As she sang the line I’d waited for, I felt tears streaming across my cheekbones and past my lips. Somehow we made it through the evils of 2020, 2021 and whatever we’ve been made to endure in 2022.
Explosions of circular yellow confetti blasted from the ceiling as we all swayed and laughed as she instructed us “blink three times when you feel it kicking in.”
I'm Just Gonna Dance All Night 