Rih's "Stay" inspired Lorde to write "Buzzcut Season"
Excerpt from Lorde's article written for the November issue of Rookie Magazine, entitled "Anatomy of a Song", in which she describes the writing process behind select songs on Pure Heroine.
Quote:
"Buzzcut Season"
This is one of the first songs I wrote for Pure Heroine. It's from December 2012. I was listening to a remix of Rihanna's "Stay" by Them Jeans on the ferry and the train on the way to the studio that morning, and I was feeling super inspired. My manager came to the studio that day (we let him in about once a month) and my producer Joel and I played him this song called "Headgame" that we had written a few days earlier.
It was the first song we had written since the Love Club EP, and it had this really grating vocal loop in the background and was just generally not a good song. My manager told us as much, which was what we needed to hear, but it seemed really harsh at the time, and we spent the next few hours in a complete funk. Nothing was clicking or working, so I did this thing I sometimes do when things aren't working, which is to leave Joel alone to mess around with his keyboard while I go sit in a little storeroom down the corridor, which for some reason has about 10 thrift-store paintings of mountains on the walls. A change of scenery usually helps me figure out what I'm doing, and there's nothing in the world that urges you to try like a bunch of snowy mountains.
So I started playing around with a lyric that began: "I remember when your head caught flame." Almost straightaway, I felt this prickling in the backs of my hands, and I could kind of see the whole song in front of me. I ran back to the studio and we stayed there till one or two in the morning writing it, and my parents shouted at both of us. It was worth it.
Buzzed heads are a very potent image to me - all my guy friends would use clippers on one another frequently and impulsively every summer, when it was too hot for hair. There's something so tough but so vulnerable about the fuzzy, pale-skinned head of a friend being shorn clean.
And I'll never go home again
(Place the call, feel it start)
Favourite friend
(and nothing's wrong but nothing's true)
I live in a hologram with you
That chorus actually took us several hours of tossing different options back and forth before it got anywhere. Melodically, I think it's my second favourite chorus that I've written - the head-tossy-y, impulsive first line is the kind of thing you say as a kid and instantly regret, and its melody is climbing but sad. This was one of those songs where I didn't really know what it wsa about until after we'd written it, and then it helped me see something clearly. I was writing about a friendship that was lovely but stifling, one I'd been trying to tell myself was OK, but it just wasn't working. We had spent a lot of time doing summer things - being by a pool, going to parties in the warm dark air - and those things were all I could picture while I was writing it. I remember closing my eyes and seeing on the back of my lids how water looks with light on it, all dappled and shimmery. I was inside this hologram, which was sweet and good, but not real or lasting. "Nothing's wrong when nothing's true" still tastes sad when I sing it.
