Simply being loved lyrics mac#

“But it’s time to cool it down/Whatever that means.” “I’d ride and I’d ride on the carousel, ’round and ’round/Forever, if I could,” the three sing together.

The joke of “Stoned at the Nail Salon” is all in the title: At the end of every verse, she undercuts her own despairing ruminations with the chorus “Maybe I’m just stoned at the nail salon again.” But as she’s joined by Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo - two ascendant stars on similar paths of cultishly beloved stardom - the song feels heavier.

Lorde’s music also carries a wry sense of humor. “Got a wishbone drying on the windowsill in my kitchen,” Lorde sings over gentle guitar, acknowledging her good fortune - before wondering whether she actually rolled snake eyes instead: “Just in case I wake up and realize I’ve chosen wrong.” True to its title, the song mimics the feeling of being high in a quotidian setting: warm, sun-kissed, with currents of uncertainty and sadness cresting its blissed-out surface. “Solar Power” orbits around the acoustic glow of “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” a single that doubles as the album’s mission statement. Each record captures an artist in the afterglow of unprecedented success, pondering their place in the world and worrying that the paths they have chosen lead to nothing but regret - Young with his big folk-rock creations and Lorde with her slight, spartan pop songs. Lorde has referred to “Solar Power” as a “weed album,” and as an artistic statement it recalls another cannabis-conjured record, if not in sound then in form: Neil Young’s 1974 bummer masterpiece, “On the Beach,” which he recorded while consuming sticky-sweet homemade edibles known as “honey slides.” Young was 28 when “On the Beach” was released Lorde is 25. Tonally, it could not be more different from the hair-raising intimacy of her previous album, “Melodrama” (2017). The New Zealand pop phenom returned after a long absence with “Solar Power,” released in August, befuddling fans and critics with a seemingly lackadaisical new mode of creation. Is it any wonder, then, that several pop stars have expressed a desire in the last year to retreat from the spotlight, to imagine what their music and their life would have been if they had never found success at all? “Things I once enjoyed/Just keep me employed now,” sighs 20-year-old Billie Eilish - who has enjoyed more industry success in the last two years than most see in an entire career - on “Getting Older.” It’s the opening track on her ironically titled second album, “Happier Than Ever,” an excellent record that sounds like a slow, quiet backing away from anything resembling popularity.Īnd after a decade of being a lightning rod for public scrutiny, Lana Del Rey closed last year’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free” - a song about the joys of creation when no one’s paying attention, and one that, in Del Rey’s context, doubles as a reference to her own thorny relationship with public life.īut few have captured this camera-shy moment as clearly as Lorde.

Simply being loved lyrics mac#

Even the indie rocker Mac DeMarco questions it, on his song “Passing Out Pieces”: “Passing out pieces of me/Don’t you know nothing comes free?” But thanks to the hyperconnectivity of the digital age, you don’t even have to be massively famous to become wary of the attention economy. The battlefield of the top of the pop charts is littered with superstars audibly struggling to survive the perils of fame. The revelations unearthed during the recent dissolution of Britney Spears’s conservatorship were just more proof that blowing up can leave lasting damage.

Hip-hop might seem more comfortable flaunting stardom and status, but doing so is no less burdensome for its practitioners observe the gold-plated tears shed by Drake or Kanye West in any of their attention-grabbing invectives against attention or DJ Khaled’s 2013 album, “Suffering From Success,” featuring his pained visage on the cover offset by blindingly bright drip. “What you get is no tomorrow/What you need, you have to borrow,” David Bowie sneered on his 1975 single “Fame.” Years later, on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain - an artist who practically drafted the modern blueprint for despising your own success - bemoaned what his prodigiousness had wrought: “I’m worse at what I do best/And for this gift, I feel blessed.” In rock, being famous is often treated as a self-inflicted wound.