Lorde's Melodrama turned 6 years old today. (Patreon)

When this record first came out, I was 22. I had not met Mason. I had just graduated college. I was in this part of my life that I found bizarre and strange where I was by all counts an adult, but I knew that I wasn't, actually. I had my own apartment and my own car and my own life and friends who always wanted to go out and also a sense that I was never going to be any younger or any older than I was, like I would stay trapped at 22 forever, and it was a thought that filled me with total dread and total elation at the same time. 

I had a casual interest in Lorde, being that she was a de-facto member of Taylor's (then murdered) girl squad, and because I really enjoyed Pure Heroine, her debut record. I remember finding her annoying, if talented, and wise beyond her years, if also deeply naïve and immature. As if these things were not also true about myself. 

I remember where I was when I first sat down and listened to Melodrama - the lead single, Green Light, had underwhelmed me, and I was disappointed by it at the time. I guess I found it overzealous. But I listen to all major releases, especially from the leading ladies of pop, so I came home from work, laid down in my bed in my brand new and often lonely apartment, the bedroom with red string lights that was smaller than my closet at my parents' house, and I listened to Melodrama front to back. 

The connection was immediate. I felt attacked by the honesty and frankness with which she wrote about the way it feels to be considered an adult while knowing deep down you have no idea what you're doing, about the way everyone is drinking too much including yourself, about how everyone is talking all the time but no one is actually saying anything, about putting on an outfit and your makeup and going out and pretending like your life is set in an Instagram filter and then going home and sitting alone on your bed and wondering if you're doing it all wrong, if everyone is happier than you, if everyone has more friends than you, if everyone is a grown up and you're just the kid playing dress up. Lorde may have been 18/19 at the time of Melodrama's creation and release, but I felt like she was in the exact same place mentally as me and a lot of my friends - she was at a precipice in her life and in her career. I was at a precipice, too. She knew the same things that I knew. All of it was bullshit. All of it was amazing. 

Homemade Dynamite, Perfect Places, Sober, and Green Light were all songs about the unique feeling of adulthood meeting childhood, and how that experience only lasts for one brief flash of time, a single Summer, and Melodrama had come out at the exact Summer where I was living that. Going out every night is just what people did, right? Blacking out drunk and waking up confused and worried about what you had said or done is just what people did, right? Massive fights with your best friend under the neon glow of bar signs, kissing strangers, kissing your close friends then pretending it didn't happen, drunk walks home, getting up and doing it all over again - it was literally Melodrama. Thinking about how perfectly the album captured all of it in so many words still to this day surprises me. 

The standout tracks for me, back then and now, are Liability and Hard Feelings/Loveless. Liability is hard to listen to even after all these years for how much it felt like I was caught on smack cam, how feeling like you're too much for somebody can be the worst feeling in the entire world, and changing feels impossible. Hard Feelings/Loveless is such a deep and visceral look into a relationship from start to finish, all the way through to the crash and burn and anger and rage. Some of her best writing happened on these two tracks. 

I didn't know it at the time, and maybe only came to realize this in the past couple of years, but Melodrama is a record that defined an entire year for me. It feels perfectly captured, to the point where when I listen to it now, I can imagine myself in that tiny bedroom in my first apartment, I can see myself in the lights of the bars I don't go to anymore, I can feel the summer air between my fingers out the window of the car I sold years ago. It's like a supercut. I have not had a summer like 2017 since then, and I know, deep down, I never will again. The record that plays when I think of it today is Melodrama. Sometimes I play it just to feel 22 again. 

Thank you to Lorde and to Melodrama and to my younger self. What an incredible fucking record and an incredible Summer. No matter what Lorde may create in the future, and no matter what records she puts out that flop (...you know who...) we will always have Melodrama. A career defining magnum opus that is so fucking important to so many people.