Lorde Felt ‘Misunderstood’ by Charli XCX Before Their Collab on ‘Girl, So Confusing’

Lorde and Charli XCX both found clarity after working things out on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix. Before hopping on the fan-favorite Brat track, the New Zealand singer-songwriter felt quite misconstrued by her friend.

Chatting for Charli’s new Billboard cover story, Lorde opened up about her perspective on the cathartic experience of recording the remix. The English alt-pop star had originally sent her the track as a heads-up that it was about the strain she felt in their friendship. This gesture inspired “both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of, ‘Man, I’ve been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right,’” said the “Solar Power” musician.

In response, Lorde almost immediately suggested teaming up for a joint remix. “I don’t know if you like me/ Sometimes I think you might hate me/ Sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli sings on the track. Lorde then joins in with, “You’d always say, ‘Let’s go out’/ But then I’d cancel last minute/ I was so lost in my head/ And scared to be in your pictures.”

“When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time,” Lorde told Billboard. “There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying. I love that we truly did work it out on the remix. There’s something very brat about that, something very meta and modern.”

“Only Charli could make that happen,” she continued. “She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said.”

The cover story comes a little more than a month after the “Von Dutch” singer dropped her critically acclaimed album Brat, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — her highest peak on the chart to date. The album has also inspired a wave of new internet trends, with many fans viewing it as a long-overdue commercial triumph for the tastemaker. Lorde echoed this sentiment, stressing, “Charli’s been doing this.”

“Michelangelo apparently once said, ‘I’m just going to carve away all that is not David,’” the “Green Light” artist shared with Billboard. “And I feel that that’s what we are getting to witness in real time: Charli saying to herself, ‘I’m going to carve away all that is not Charli.’”

Source: Billboard