It turns out Lorde and Charli XCX really did work it out on the remix. In a new cover story for Billboard, Charli went into detail about the making of her album brat and specifically the song “girl, so confusing” and its subsequent remix featuring Lorde. Ultimately, the experience of getting Lorde to approve the song mirrored some of the experience Charli depicted in the lyrics. “I had to go through the process of telling her that this song is about her and her being okay with that first,” she told the outlet. “I was trying to meet up with her for almost a year, and we kept having this weird, like, we were [going to], then we wouldn’t. It spoke to the narrative of the song itself.”
For the uninitiated, the original “girl, so confusing” lyrics directly address the insecurities, tensions, and fears that often go unspoken between friends. And according to Charli’s account, those issues stayed unspoken until just before the album release. “The day before the record came out, I left her a voice note,” she told Billboard. Meanwhile, Lorde told Billboard that her initial reaction to the song was a “two-part thing of both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of Man, I’ve been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right.”
Which she did. According to Charli, Lorde “replied straight away and was like, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea you felt this way. I’m so sorry.’ And then was like, ‘You know, maybe I should be on a version of the song.’ I didn’t even ask her. She brought it up.” Apparently, the remix was totally unplanned and the process took three days, which is enough to convince me the text-message screenshot Charli posted on Instagram was real. After sending it, she attended Charli’s show at the Brooklyn Paramount. We all know what happened next: the internet really did go crazy over the remix.
“When I was listening to [Lorde’s] verse for the first time, I was backstage at the show,” Charli continued. “My hairstylist also does her hair. He had also just done her hair for the show, too, so he was just with her, and then he came to me and was like, ‘I’m so happy you guys are good.’”
And they really did work it out on the remix, according to Lorde. “When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time,” she said. “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 had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said.” She added: “This whole thing has been such a huge honor.”
Now all we can do is hope and pray that Lorde’s highly anticipated fourth album will actually come out this year.
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