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And Finally Artist News
Lorde addresses viral ‘shushing’ video
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 25 April 2022
Lorde has addressed a viral video showing her shushing her audience at concerts, saying that it takes what she was doing very much out of context, while accompanying claims online that she hates people singing along at her shows are completely wrong.
“I just wanted to talk about this thing of me shushing people at my shows”, she says in a video shared with Instagram fan account @lordecontent. “That was something that I did on that one song a couple times when I wanted to sing it a capella – or off the microphone – so people could hear me and because I wanted to try something different”.
“If you come to my shows”, she adds, “you know it’s an hour-and-a-half of all of us singing and screaming together. Also that dramatic-ass move was literally for an album called ‘Melodrama’, so don’t stress too hard”.
The viral video shows various times on stage where Lorde has shushed or motioned her audience to be quiet – though always at the same point in the same song, ‘Writer In The Dark’, and when she was, indeed, singing unaccompanied. The ‘Melodrama’ tour, during which all the clips were filmed, took place in 2017 and 2018.
At a show in Chicago on Saturday – the night before sharing the video response on Instagram – the musician performed ‘Writer In The Dark’ for the first time since 2018, and reflected on how she performed the song on that earlier tour.
She said: “I would put my mic down and walk all over the stage and sing the song. I was nineteen, you know? Very dramatic, a lot of feelings. The internet has decided this was very bad and very rude. I think they mustn’t have come to one of these shows cos it’s such a communal vibe. We’re all singing and screaming all the time”.
“Occasionally, I think there are moments for silence and moments for sound”, she went on. “There are moments that belong to just one person and there are moments that are all of ours, and that’s just life. But I had a weird moment with it, I was like, ‘Huh, I’ve been misunderstood’. I was sitting there this morning having gone on the internet and I was like, ‘Oh, people don’t get me’”.
I went to a gig once where the artist shushed the audience, but that was because a good half of said audience talked loudly to each other the entire way through the show at which, it should be noted, the band were recording a live album. Stupid noisy audiences. Gigs would be much better without other people there, I think we can all agree. More shushing, I say.
