I'M WAITING FOR IT, THAT GREEN LIGHT, I WANT IT
i whisper things and lorde's song (and 2017 album) sing them back to me
I don’t really like F. Scott Fitzgerald or anything like that, but in October of 1925, he wrote from France to a writer named Marya Mannes: “You are thrilled by New York-- I doubt you will be after five more years when you are more fully nourished from within. I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off my dreams. America's greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after awhile you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old and nothing happens to American art because America is the story of the moon that never rose.”
I lived in New York for the majority of four years because I went to college there. I live in the US because my mother married my father here, came from far away, and I work here, too, but not in New York, not in a big city, and my coworkers at my low-wage job ask me, Why are you here? Why aren’t you there, in New York? Tell me, was the weather nice when you visited? Why are you here? Get out, Alex, get out of here. Go live your life. They have said these things to me verbatim. I’m not using artistic license.
This is a study in waiting.
—
When Lorde’s song “Green Light” was released as the lead single for her album Melodrama, I was seventeen. We all know that seventeen is kind of an ugly year, or, at least, I hope we all know, and I use ugly as a vague word, I do it on purpose. Ugly isn’t necessarily bad in the grand scheme of things. When people say ugly, they often mean a lot or too much to handle or not comprehensible to me, so I hate it. Ugly is just fine to look back on, exciting, even, if you’re the sort of person who thinks chaos leads to better things, which I’m not always. If you’re the sort of person who thinks beauty comes from obstacles, which I usually am not. Well, then. I am certain, even now, that Year 17 was the hardest year of my life.
Through it all, there was Melodrama. I associate it with the highway to Denver, on which I would play the album during the drive to visit the modern art museum or go to restaurants to draw people in my sketchbook, alone. A lot of people didn’t love Melodrama. A lot of people wanted Lorde’s album Pure Heroine again, and they wanted a teenager who didn’t know how to interact with people talk about how she hated parties. I’ve always had this thing going on with Lorde that, because I’m a few years younger than her, her music always was a few years ahead of me and my experiences, and what she had described in Pure Heroine was more of what I was experiencing at age seventeen than when I was thirteen, because she was actually, you know, seventeen at the time. Listening to Lorde’s music, I would build these fantasies, largely subconsciously, about what teenage-hood was supposed to be like, and then, with Melodrama, I built fantasies about what being in my early twenties would be like. Parties and crying and doing makeup in someone else’s car.
So, then: people wanted “Royals”, and they got songs like “Homemade Dynamite” and “Sober”. And when “Green Light” came out, there was a subdued murmur among casual fans of Lorde not willing to take the journey with her, confused at the new, more bombastic and sleek sort of production that contrasted with Pure Heroine’s minimalistic sound and tone. Pure Heroine was all about tennis courts and bleachers behind the school and hazy summers. Melodrama was about a breakup, and Ubers to parties you would cry in the bathroom of, and how relationships were hard, and wonderful, and took everything out of you. It had something in common with Pure Heroine, though: it was also about summer.
Take her song “The Louvre”. I know by this point if you’re not a [hardcore?] Lorde fan, you’re probably considering leaving me to talk to myself by now. But- have you heard this fucking song? Did you hear it at age seventeen and walk to your community pool and swim alone until the thunderstorms made everyone leave, did you learn the chords on the guitar you spent years saving for, that you never bought a guitar strap for, that sits in your bedroom even now, eyeing you as you write this, because you can’t remember the chords anymore, and you still haven’t been to the Louvre.
I keep waiting for the day I get to go and travel and see a museum like the Louvre. When I first saw the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I believed that I physically felt my heart swell and change shape. It’s my favorite place I’ve ever walked around in. It’s a labyrinth of art, sure, but it’s also a labyrinth of experiences for me: the people I’ve gone into it with, they’ve changed over the years, and when I visited New York last month for a little over a week - an impulsive, expensive decision that I don’t regret - I went back there and thought, Oh, nothing’s changed. I still feel the same. Familiarity! Familiarity in love! Alarm bells go off in my head: it’s time to find new places to kiss the tar of.
—
In my last letter, I hailed summer as an ending, as a beginning, as a fantasy. I can never seem to grab it by the shoulders and force it to look at me as an equal. My heart pounds and I listen to Melodrama again as I write this, and it’s endless May, June, July, August. Still, though, its summer is not perfect, and it’s not tennis courts or friendship framed by the playgrounds you knew as children. October is here, now, with me, and it terrifies me. There are ticking clocks above my head. Real, awful ones. Winter looms on the horizon and it says, If you haven’t done anything right by the time I reach you, you’re failing, my love. I know Winter well. I know it does not love me. It does not feel anything at all.
The mutterings of discontent about “Green Light” are fainter in memory and are harder to find, these days, because critics were ultimately widely excited about Melodrama as an album. Pitchfork gave it an 8.8 out of 10, high praise (yeah, I’m bringing up Pitchfork). Stacey Anderson wrote for the review: “Melodrama is Lorde’s study of being a young woman finding her own conviction in unsteady circumstances. Sometimes, this also involves being single—a breakup and a raucous house party serve as thematic through-lines—but romance is only part of the album’s script. In the difficult, exhilarating course of the record, written largely when Lorde was 18 and 19, her true reward comes with her embrace of self. As a nod to her clearest pop forbearer, her peace is in accepting that she will, sometimes, end up dancing on her own.”
A study of being a young woman! Finding her own conviction in unsteady circumstances! How inspiring, to twenty-two year old me, grasping at any straws she possibly can to make herself feel better. I’m on the job search. I want to move out. I want to move to California, which Lorde ultimately leaves and says she must never turn back to. Her mistakes are enticing, exhilarating, and I salivate at perfect places, even when she confesses that she can’t explain what those even are. More on that later.
Despite my age and my own personal experience, Lorde reached me, in 2017. Obviously this is the power of art and all that. I cried to “Green Light” a lot. I didn’t understand what she was talking about in specifics; I hadn’t had a break-up, or even a formal romantic relationship, but I understood heartbreak. Through the years, I have always loved the line “I know about what you did and I want to scream the truth” and, even more so, the lines following: “She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar.” I knew what it was like to feel wronged. Waiting has always felt, despite my best efforts not to, like betrayal. Like injustice. Like others were getting something I had to sit tight on the sidelines for.
I vividly remember listening to this song a year or two ago for the first time in a while and going, …Ah. My twenties had caught up to me. Those great whites, they have big teeth. I had so much rage. I had so many regrets. I had spent my teenage years waiting for confidence, for experience, and it had hit me all at once- I was in a different city, with new, thrilling people and places, and I still had so much to sob about. I had more to laugh about, though, in exchange. I loved New York, then. I thought, I’ll just keep going bigger and better. I felt as if my trajectory was a straight line heading up. To be forced to take a breather - that I still haven’t seemed to have accepted - has been awful and shocking, and even though I hated a lot of the parties I would frequent around the time I turned twenty, I find myself missing them. Waiting, yeah, for when I’ll get to suffer through them again.
That’s the thing- are those parties lost to me? I’m, like, old now. I’m, like, twenty fucking two. I don’t want to live in New York. I’m not going to get into it why, here. If you know, you know. But, still. I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off my dreams. So much I haven’t seen. My coworkers sometimes call me a New Yorker, which I obviously am not. I was a tourist, almost; I was never deeply ingrained into what it meant to be there, and of course, never knew what it was like to grow up there, don’t know the intricacies of the city outside of a college art student who tried, despite all this, to let the city eat her alive and spit her out, if only for the experience. I could’ve tried harder, though. Really.
When I went to visit, I was thinking thoughts like This might be the last time in a long time and What’s going on, it’s like all I want to do are the things I’ve already done, here. Where was my sense of adventure. The whole time - and I’m sorry, my friends - I was thinking, I want to be consumed by somewhere new.
And now, noticeably, I’m still in my hometown, broke as fuck and convinced I’m doing something wrong.
When I was in high school, I had a bit (…well) of a reckless streak, the sort that would have encouraged me to drag race other cars in the dead of night, if I’d had a better car or anyone to race that wasn’t some dude from my high school in his dad’s Porsche. Don’t tell anyone. I never did it. Perhaps it was more the idea of doing it, that got me. It’s kind of lame, or naive, but to satiate this need, I would try my hardest to always end up first at a stop light, and I’d train myself to predict when a light would turn green, so I could floor it (in my shitty car, oh my god, I was so embarrassing, no one even cared, girl!) and speed off onto open road.
—
But I hear sounds in my mind, brand new sounds in my-
I mean, I’m still kind of like that. I’m better at handling it, though, narrowing it down into a fine point, consumable, easy to use, to show off. I miss going to clubs. I miss late night train rides. I miss screaming with my friends for fun.
That’s what gets me. I’m, like, totally spontaneous and love new experiences! I moved across the country for college on my own as others cowered in fear, wow. Ha. So why am I waiting? Who’s responsible for this? It’s not my choice. It’s not, I promise- I’m applying to all these jobs and thinking of all these things and the universe must understand that I really want it, that I really fucking want it, that I want to move on to the next phase of my life, that I’m sure is coming, and more is at stake than ever, but over the years I’ve become less and less patient. People have, throughout my whole life, often told me to both slow down and make sure I’m keeping up, which has led to a seesaw in my brain that makes me feel bad for taking breaks but also terrible when I don’t. I’ve got a lot of prove in a lot of areas. I guess we all do.
Or maybe it’s self-made. Who knows. I hate waiting for the light to change, though.
What do I call this forced-waiting? If I say that a higher power has imposed it upon me, does that not make it worse, because then there’s someone saying, Yeah, let’s make her suffer for a while, and they’re doing it for some reason I can’t even comprehend, and - most importantly - that means that it doesn’t matter what I do, because I could just end up losing forever anyway, because it’s not my choice. But then there’s the more sane, factual thought that it is my choice, and I’m doing my best, but sometimes your best isn’t enough. That is, I hope, until that changes.
I recall other times I’ve spent waiting: the time I moved high schools, when I was fourteen, aware it was going to happen when my family followed a new job prospect. That time I was anxiously messaging a now ex-friend, who broke my heart, and they didn’t respond for an hour, our last fight. The months I waited to see them again. I never did. The time I missed a flight at the airport by five minutes, watched it leave the runway through the window, and proceeded to get stuck in the airport for thirteen hours as the next flight got delayed and delayed and delayed again. The times I’ve waited for family members to leave hospitals. The times I’ve waited for people to be there for me who never were, now ghosts that show up once in a long while. Now, I don’t pay them much mind. Now, I wait for Taylor Swift’s new album, the feeling familiar, and for Hunter x Hunter to return, and for some email to come and tell me they want an interview.
There’s no pattern, I think. Grief, perhaps. Retribution. There’s always something better after waiting. Things are bound to happen. The story of the moon that never rose. That’s the fear, you nailed it, Fitzgerald. Waiting, according to many, is a necessary part of life. I, of course, have decided since youth that I would simply push past what is necessary and get a move on. Fitzgerald was wrong. Things do happen to America. Things have happened.
In the song “Hard Feelings/Loveless”, Lorde concedes, I’ll fake it every single day til’ I don’t need fantasy, ‘til I feel you leave.
So maybe waiting is an act of surrender.
—
There’s that song on the album, “Liability”. Baby really hurt me, crying in the taxi. / I do my best to meet her demands. / All that a stranger would see is one girl, swaying alone, stroking her cheek.
It’s a song, sure, about the drama, yes, the melodrama, whatever, about the exaggeration you express to yourself of others’ betrayal of you, along with the objective betrayal you witness. It’s also, in my opinion, about the betrayal of yourself. Of believing no one can reach you, and never being satisfied. Being too much for people. Isolation in the name of winning. You’re all gonna watch me disappear into the sun. Ha! Sometimes I get really sad and think that after all this waiting, something of fate’s design will whisk me away and then everyone will have to pay attention. It’ll all be worth it then. A wretched and small crumb of hope, among others.
Waiting, like most states of emotional being, is underwhelming from the outside. When others tell you they’re waiting for something, you usually meet it with a shrug. We don’t think a lot about others’ pain in that much depth. So is human nature. You say, “Well, something will change eventually.” Because it’s easier to give advice to someone else. Because our experiences fit neatly into intellectual profit. It’s not their fault. It’s just the path their life is taking. But then you’re in the thick of it and it’s like the world is ending. Isn’t it so funny and endearing of us to be so self-centered? I understand, then, how I sound when I talk about it all. I’m trying hard not to water myself down because I think I’m whining or complaining too much. I feel sad, these days. If waiting is surrender I must allow myself to feel these things and feel bad about feeling them.
Cause honey I’ll come get my things, but I can’t let go.
Lorde says this: the act of holding on is stagnation. Maybe in some cases it’s a romanticized stagnation, something sweet. But it’s still stagnation. It’s still standing still. It’s so unfair, though- why must I let go of New York? Why must I let go of my earlier years already? If this era for me is meant to teach me something then why must I learn? So many people stay the same and stay there happily. Why me. Why must it be hard. The astrology app, CoStar, is something I have on my phone despite my annoyance and disregard for it, but I must truly care somewhat because I remember that one time my daily horoscope was something like, Sharks have to keep moving to stay alive. You don’t. I hated that one.
—
At the heart of the song is the line, “I’M WAITING FOR IT, THAT GREEN LIGHT, I WANT IT.” Several Lordes harmonizing and screaming it at once. At the heart of Melodrama is a dark, neon cityscape, where she learns to party and then isn’t sure what that partying means, though this last thing is not necessarily tinged with negativity.
I’m trying to get better at waiting. I don’t say this to flex, because I hate that shit, but I have proof, despite my tears, despite my sorrows and bad dreams, that things are slowly changing, or have the potential to: I got a few offers for jobs, but they fell through.
And I wish I didn’t have to rely so much on a job for happiness, as I said in the last letter, but there’s this feeling in me, deep in there, one I kind of despise looking at or acknowledging, that smiles and says, There’s something coming. The sort I’ve always felt, my whole life. It’s always been right. There’s always something coming.
Waiting is also the act of disrespecting the present moment, isn’t it. That’s the hard truth. The hard feeling, even. Waiting means you’re saying the Right Now isn’t worth it- something else in the future is. Which, mind you, is a completely valid feeling to have. But the fact is there. And I mourn the past, in my waiting, but I know my future is not going to be like that. That’s a good thing, yes, but new things raise the heart rate, even if you say it doesn’t. I’m waiting for something that will be different from everything I’ve ever known. Waiting is essentially fantasy. It’s daydreaming. How cruel. I don’t mean to be rude to the present moment. I love the present moment. We’re good friends. We’re just having a fight, right now. It’ll clear up in the morning. Mornings are cold, a lot of the time, or at least colder than the rest of the day. So are winters.
—
—
Again, I somehow understood Melodrama on a personal level, but some lyrics hit me harder now, particularly all of “Perfect Places”, the content of which I think about in depth, these days. If they keep telling me where to go, I’ll blow my brains out to the radio. I have so much anger! So much feeling! I think waiting grates on me, now, because I also have to keep feelings in check due to their lack of outlet. There’s nothing to do about it. An old-person thing to say, maybe. I get some more bad news and eat my breakfast. And I’m a Lorde super-fan, I must confess. Is it too obvious? I’ve listened to all the podcasts, I’ve read all the articles. I tore out Teen Vogue photoshoots of her from the physical magazine and tacked them on my wall as a teenager. I watched all her interviews. I remember her describing music now as “post- [Frank Ocean’s] Blonde” and it’s still in my brain. That’s how I started listening to Frank Ocean. I know her full name. A para-social relationship, sure, but also something deeper, more reflective of me- I think a lot about her, in New Zealand, on the beaches with only her closest friends, her boyfriend, and I think about her dog dying. I think about how every year she leaves less and less for her fans to consume, and I think about how she talks about her life, now, which sounds slow and peaceful, something I often think I won’t have for years, if my current mindset has anything to do with it. I don’t think I’m happy with sitting still right now, unfortunately. I don’t have to do any of it, but I do. So the waiting becomes necessary. I make it necessary. I lied. I make it necessary. I lie and I lie and I lie in wait.
Let me show you one of my favorite Lorde interviews. It’s this one. I remember reading it when I was younger. Strange, how things follow us. Things wait and they linger and they show up again only to wait again. Anyway. The interviewer, Jonah Weiner, writes:
“Taking quite so much time on ‘Melodrama’ was never Lorde’s master plan. (In July 2014, a member of her camp spoke hopefully to me of an “early 2015” release date.) But follow-ups are hard to make and can be especially vexing when they follow smash debuts. For three full days before ‘Green Light’ came out, she said: ‘I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want to be out in the world. It was so intense to arrive at this moment of, ‘This is it.’ And, she added, ‘whatever it is, it’s about to be out of my control.’
Melodrama is a love letter to pop. Pop, like waiting, is related to feeling. It’s my most beloved genre of music. The album is about parties. I have waited in line for clubs and I have waited in cars to get to parties. Most of them were awful. That doesn’t mean I regret them.
“She emphasized that ‘Melodrama’ wasn’t a ‘breakup album.’ Instead, she said, ‘it’s a record about being alone. The good parts and the bad parts.’
Back to Perfect Places. What the fuck are perfect places, anyway?
What am I waiting for. How can I not wait for it. If there was a cure for waiting, I would drink it up in a sliver of a second. What would I sacrifice to make time move faster. To make decisions go quicker. To make fate get in time with me. But for what, really. I’ll wait and get to the next thing and keep waiting. Shit, that’s the big one. I’ll never be satisfied, not like this. So maybe I need to- stop waiting. Melodrama is also about coming to terms with yourself, which is a perpetual state of growth, I’ve learned, a forever sort of cycle. For better or for worse. So maybe I can wait and also enjoy this moment. Is it that obvious? Is it that easily done, when I don’t even know what I’m waiting for, really?
Last one.
“Lorde’s bugbear at the moment was a song called ‘Perfect Places,’ about going to parties and hooking up, in which she pierces an atmosphere of hedonism with stabs of melancholy — a recurring technique across the album. ‘It’s lived a million lives,’ Lorde said of the composition. ‘We’ve tried it at different tempos, used different voicings, took it half time, made it weird and druggy, but that didn’t work. A big problem is that there’s so much to the song. The other day I had a breakthrough: What if we delete the entire prechorus? Just take it out, and I never have to hear it again in my life? We did, and now the whole thing follows a much simpler trajectory.’ Lorde frowned. ‘But we still haven’t cracked the code.’
“Ha, ha,” I had said to that coworker of mine, the one who had asked me what I’m doing here. “I wish I knew!”