Frank's Diary: Myself Through Ella.
Entry #3: Yet another quadrennial.
Today, I’m reporting to you live from the desk where I first deemed myself a writer. I was fourteen, twig-thin, head vacant with a leering, hungry eye for a passion I had yet to discover. I wrote of a wild child discovered in the woods by a rich man who owned many houses, a plane, and properties in places around the world you could hardly pronounce. He was, despite the current and understandably frustrating nature of the world’s one percent, kind, willing not only to teach his new friend about human civilization but to learn and listen about the normalcies and habits of his new friend’s livelihood. In this story, the rich man spoke of music as stories heard, absorbed, and constantly anticipated by the masses of his own kind. I wrote this with Lorde in mind—an anchor, a fallback, and a reminder to myself and many my age that I’m yet another four years older. I don’t remember how the story ended or the prompt of the essay to begin with, but I remember Ella Marija Lani-Yelich O’Connor abandoning white teeth for buoyant, vibrant, melancholy bangers through the speakers of the car I still wasn’t old enough to drive.
The passage of time for me has always been measured in units of milestones, good, bad, and ugly. When Royals became the single biggest thing in the world, I certainly noticed, but eventually it evolved into a sort of white noise to expect on the radio at 8:07 am, carpooling in the backseat of a minivan on the way to fifth grade. It was a song that, despite only hearing it against my own accord, I knew every word to. It stuck to my brain like glue as I chanted under my breath about chipped teeth on expensive jewels while finishing my science fair poster board about what makes ice melt the fastest. Seeing as I was ten, I’d be lying if I said I camped by my iPod until midnight on the 27th of September, 2014, to purchase Pure Heroine, but I recall watching the Grammys in our now non-existent living room, and for the first time, I put face to a name. There stood seventeen-year-old Ella, long dark hair, black garments from head to toe, quirky, awkward, and anxious in her dispositions. Win after win, she seemed more shocked and reserved, strangely puzzled by the merit of her goliath success of a record. She was fiddly yet endearing, and I’d choose to keep up with new releases of hers until, like the rest of the world now knows, she disappeared.
Elusive now was O’Connor, tabloids questioning whether she’d ever return until two years passed, then three, then, like many morsels of mainstream conversation, the fire began to run dim until suddenly, the bellows blew, and like Paul Revere, the masses were alerted of something shiny and new from the lost legend herself.
I so vividly recall that this was my first year on Instagram, a complete nuisance to society, posting the worst photos angled five feet to the left with heavy sepia, and a Tumblr quote that I believed was well beyond my fourteen years. There, I remember the post, ambiguous as ever, a vivid green light with a link to imwaitingforit.com, where words that made no sense on their own slowly appeared by the green light that burned bright on the homepage. Green Light would come out no more than two weeks later, then Perfect Places, then Homemade Dynamite, each part of a dire awakening that you can, in fact, dance like a maniac under disco balls with tears in your eyes and a hole through your heart. I left middle school with Melodrama, the secret bookmark in the depths of my iPod buried under terrible rap and one or two country songs, each of which served the purpose of burying my queerness under a mound that I’m sure was already quite transparent. Middle school boys are brutal, and to be gay was to be regarded as an object below a pedestal that seemed so important but never actually existed.
High school, the underbelly of the beast that was self-discovery, was like a carriage ride through towering hills and cavernous valleys. I knew the drill now was to enjoy the music I was given, with the understanding that by the time I left, Ella, too, would leave rooms of deep blue and loose glitter and live to write anew.
In the summers of my Maryland hometown, I worked on the water—a nice place to make a few bucks and an excuse to kayak at sunset free of charge. There I sat in the hot, muggy shack full of soggy lifejackets and waterlogged paddles, watching YouTube to pass the time, when, for the first time since school had ended, an email occupied the top right corner of my laptop. “From Lorde,” it read.
“What?”
There before me were the words of another four years gone by, characteristically poetic and frustratingly mysterious:
“Her skin is glowing, her lovers are many. I’m completely obsessed with her, and soon you will be too,” it read, revealing a divine pregnancy with her summer-clad, high and dry third-born Solar Power.
Soon to follow, the big reveal of the blond bombshell Lorde drove the new era with a vengeance, dance floors and molly rock were now clear calendars, bare feet in the hot sand, and THC out of a bamboo pipe. Born on a late August evening, she was received by the public as the runt of the group. Folks once expecting sweeping basslines and club classics were suddenly met with stripped, slow burns, the wispy strums of a placid blue 1965 Fender Jaguar, and a million questions:
“Has Lorde passed her peak?”
“Has experimentation worked to her detriment?”
“Has she lost herself in the drab of the music?”
The mystique of this very discography is rooted in one simple reminder: that fostering one's authenticity in the current moment, whether genuine or phased, is the way art at any capacity holds onto its allure. On repeat or not, it sings in its own corner of tender, raw chronicles immortalized by those who choose to believe it or don’t. I would see Lorde for the first time live in this era, tucked in a far-away cranny of Merriweather Post Pavilion while she danced with an unabashed freedom, dressed in a glittery red one-piece and blond braids with faintly outgrown roots—a peek at her looming exit into nothingness once again. I touched the cold railing in front of me to give myself a sensation to remember from that moment that wasn’t pure drunkenness and bemusement. A raw, conscious act of presence.
And so it begins once again. Here, now, I’ve lived a new collection of ambitions that my ten-year-old self would have been confused by, my fourteen-year-old self would have thought completely impossible, and my eighteen-year-old self was anxiously anticipating. The big city became my home, my friends my guiding force, music my medicine. Just over a month ago, I walked cap and gown across the big stage as a forever declaration of grownuphood. There, too, Virgin, the fateful fourth offering would be born of excitement and confusion. Of misdirection in one’s identity and visceral, all-encompassing urges. Of a self-awareness that is as sacred as it is agonizing. Misdirected and flailing in the prospect of my future, suddenly I am the wild child, my literary baby, now a pre-teen from my creative conception eight years ago. Aimless is the approach to the path I’m on, guided by this sole, staccato beacon, once confusing at its introduction, now a pin in a book with many chapters still unwritten.
Ella is my rich man.
