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What Was That ‘Green Light’ Reference?

Lorde’s new song, “What Was That,” is full of self-referential lyrics. Let’s break them down.

Here, Lorde references her struggle with disordered eating that she first opened up about on her “Girl, so confusing” verse with Charli XCX: “I tried to starve myself thinner, but then I gained all the weight back.” Lorde previously told Vogue that the Melodrama album is very specifically inspired by doing MDMA (as opposed to Solar Power, which is about weed). She was 16 when she became a pop star with “Royals,” and on “Perfect Places,” she famously intoned, “I’m 19 and I’m on fire.” “Indio haze,” meanwhile, refers to the land of Coachella, where Lorde made her debut at just 17.

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