lorde

my lorde lore is that i had tickets to her solar power tour back in 2022 (vaguely remember being on shift at the campus library during the presale war…) but then she cancelled the night before the show due to illness and i couldn’t make the rescheduled date (day after i landed in taiwan for my study abroad semester). so when this tour was announced i immediately booked myself in and camped out during presale…well i should’ve expected it but the ticketing war was INSANE. i was planning to get 4 tickets but all the other lordeheads in the queue with me were working overtime to snatch the seats that i wanted, and then it bled over to a meeting that i was supposed to lead, so while my coworkers were making small talk i just blindly rapid fired at ticketmaster from the corner of my eye and came out with 2 seats that i didn’t even have time to look at until my meeting was over.

and THEN virgin came out…to be honest it kind of flopped for me at first listen and lorde herself had a weird pr crisis during the rollout so my hype for it deflated a little. i mean pure heroine and melodrama are objectively perfect platinum all-kill albums in my house so i had veeeeeery high expectations, i didn’t dislike solar power but i definitely don’t listen to it as much as the other two so i was hoping that L4 would be a return to form. i appreciate it NOW post-concert having experienced it live but i definitely found the songs underwhelming at first…loved the i’m probably non binary but i’m an international pop star so idc about that right now visuals though.

openers were japanese house and blood orange – i didn’t know either of them but i got the sense that they’re both pretty famous in their own right? i liked their performances but wasn’t really compelled to look them up after. after seeing sophie hunter open for sleigh bells my partner and i blasted her in the car on the drive home lmao.

lorde was an INCREDIBLE performer. she had such a magnetic stage presence and the stage design, camerawork, choreo, and visuals were so striking, and very sensual and intimate which i wasn’t expecting…there was one song where she slowly unbuckled and stripped off her jeans, another where she lifted her shirt while her backup dancers shot close ups of her torso with handheld cams, and then one where she took off her top completely (in the dark but i could see her silhouette from my seat) and applied silver duct tape across her chest ala man of the year mv. i didn’t feel like it was sexual at all, but rather her emulating the type of self-intimacy you grace yourself with when you’re in your room alone free to be and act however you want, which was the overarching theme of the concert.

her performance was really cohesive with the stage design, watching her belt the outro to supercut while running barefoot on a treadmill was sooo euphoric. her ments were also really sweet T__T she talked about writing songs as a teen, feeling lonely and isolated in her own head as she did, longing to connect with other people…and to be here now singing and dancing barefoot in a t shirt and boy shorts and a windbreaker, watching thousands of people echoing the lyrics she wrote as a teen who felt stuck in her life. i just found her really sweet and genuine and personal and the crowd gave that joyful energy back at her :‘)

favs from the setlist: broken glass, my favorite off virgin; buzzcut season (i wish she’d skipped royals for other songs from PH but that was never going to happen); all the melodrama songs; and then the generational SIX-track closer at the end composed of team, what was that, green light, david, a world alone (which she added to the set at our stop!), and ribs. u already know that last was going to be a classic u_u i was going to record bits of it but i was so absorbed by the song and the laser beams and the crowd pulsing that i forgot. and then as soon as the song ended and the lights turned out GUESS WHAT SONG STARTS PLAYING…ALL MY FRIENDS! BY LCD SOUNDSYSTEM! can u fucking believe it. what a crazy emotional journey. i love u lorde forever.

my sister saw her the next day in montreal and left this note for her there :‘)

the most concerts i’ve seen in a year! standouts were lorde and sleigh bells—i’d been off my lorde wagon and honestly forgot about the concert until the week it happened and as a result was truly blown away by the production and her performance, which i don’t think would have happened if i had cared enough to go hunting for spoilers. my sister was due to see her the day after i did, so we thoroughly discussed outfits and the setlist and merch and whatnot, and it made for a pretty special experience….i’ve only seen her twice irl since i moved away from college 5 years ago and it can be hard to keep up with each other’s lives when we’ve been so far apart for so long, so i think she enjoyed bonding over being lordeheads as much as i did. also: at the end, the lights turning on over the massive expanse of td garden, and i was high enough that i could see most of the crowd, and ALL MY FRIENDS started playing….yeah. special.