Lorde – “Stoned At The Nail Salon”

Lorde – “Stoned At The Nail Salon”

Last month, Lorde released “Solar Power,” the lead single and title track from her third full-length album, which is due out 8/20. She’s been making the promotional rounds, appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on two separate occasions, once to talk about the album’s revealing cover art and again to perform “Solar Power” for the first time. (She’ll be day-drinking with Seth Meyers on TV tonight.)

Today, the New Zealand pop star is putting out Solar Power‘s second single, “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” a warm acoustic ramble. “‘Cause all the beautiful girls, they will fade like the roses/ And all the times, they will change, it’ll all come around,” Lorde sings in the chorus. “I don’t know/ Maybe I’m just stoned at the nail salon.” The track was co-written and co-produced by Jack Antonoff. And, like “Solar Power,” there’s backing vocals from Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers.

“This song is sort of a rumination on getting older, settling into domesticity, and questioning if you’ve made the right decisions,” Lorde said in a statement. “I think lots of people start asking those questions of themselves around my age, and it was super comforting to me writing them down, hoping they’d resonate with others too. I used this song as a dumping ground for so many thoughts…”

Check it out below.

Here’s the text of Lorde’s last email, which also comes with a video of Antonoff playing the song in the studio:

Hello my mates. I hope you’re doing good out there. I’ve just gotten back from a crazy amazing shoot in the middle of nowhere that I can’t tell you anything about yet, surprise surprise, but that you’ll see soon and — I’ll put money on this — shit your pants over. It was very very intense and amazing, and then it was over and we were driving back through the redwoods, and I was sitting in the back of a sprinter van with my feet up on the seat like a naughty teen, shaking my head that this is my life. It’s something I keep going on and on about, I know, but it’s just so insane, the contrast between home and here. I’ve been trading the tour bus for the grocery store line over and over since I was sixteen (I’ll probably do it forever), and a couple of years ago I realised it was time to write about those two sides to my life. I started writing this in the first six months after stopping touring for Melo. I was so tired by the end, I’d been so busy for so long, and I remember at the end of that tour saying to people I knew “I’m just going to go home and get bored” — because it had been two years since I had been at a loose end, bored out of my brain going from the couch to the fridge, and I was craving that. The first couple months of it were incredible— I’d run a bath at 10am and eat a slice of cake in it! My bandmate Jimmy and I would go out for these long lunches on Mondays and drink wine! But eventually, of course, the insecurity that this was my life now, that I wasn’t a titan of industry, but someone who just… cooked and walked the dog and gardened crept in. I was starting to fall out of step with the times culturally, I didn’t have my finger firmly on the pulse for the first time in my life, and I could feel the next round of precocious teenagers starting to come up, and I felt insecure that they were gonna eat my lunch, so to speak. Was I over the hill?!! This song was borne out of that feeling. I was sure that I was building a beautiful life for myself, but I wasn’t sure if that life was going to satisfy the same thirsty, fearless person who could tear apart a festival stage or be in seven countries in seven days. I know now that as hard as I try to run towards or away one of the sides of my life, they’re both very much who I am. It’s jarring to move between them, but that dichotomy is me. And writing this song was a real step toward embracing that. It’s almost comical to be writing this from a hotel room where my life is busier than ever, my iCal is wall to wall from wake to sleep, and of course I’m daydreaming about cooking and gardening and romanticising the greener grass once again… SO IT GOES.

I brought the kernel for this into Jack’s home studio on the same trip as Solar Power. I found this cute pic of us the day we were writing it. It’s pretty cute that we’re gonna perform this on Seth tonight the day it comes out, shoulder to shoulder two years and change to the day that we wrote it. I hope you love this song, and this side to the album, and I hope if you’re someone who also has a habit of tiptoeing up to a deep thought then doubting yourself or dissociating, you know you’re not alone.

More soon. Love you so very much, and think of you fondly, even when I can’t see you.

Til next time, may happy gods attend you,
E x

Solar Power is out 8/20 via Republic.

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