Happy BRAT summer to you, Kyle MacLachlan and Charli XCX — who is now perhaps thinking about Billboard (which she mentions on "Rewind," wondering whether she deserves commercial success) in a different way as the new Billboard Magazine cover star. She was profiled wonderfully by the publication's Kristin Robinson, with the new interview seeing the pop star explain exactly how she and Lorde working it out on the "Girl, so confusing" remix came to be.
"I had to go through the process of telling her that this song is about her and her being okay with that first," Charli remembered. "I was trying to meet up with her for almost a year, and we kept having this weird, like, we were [going to], then we wouldn't. It spoke to the narrative of the song itself. In the end, it didn't work out. Then the day before the record came out, I left her a voice note."
She explained that this prompted Lorde to respond "straight away and was like, 'Oh, my God, I had no idea you felt this way. I'm so sorry.' And then was like, 'You know, maybe I should be on a version of the song.' I didn't even ask her. She brought it up."
Charli said that "The girl, so confusing version with lorde" proceeded to come together in just three days, with Lorde sending her verse off before attending Charli's Brooklyn show. The artist born Ella Yelich-O'Connor told Robinson that her first reaction to hearing the remix was "a two-part thing of both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of 'Man, I've been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right.'"
"When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time. There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying," Lorde explained. "I love that we truly did work it out on the remix. There's something very BRAT about that, something very meta and modern. Only Charli could make that happen. She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said. I was articulating things I'd never said or maybe even things I've never even heard said. This whole thing has been such a huge honour."
Charli herself listened to Lorde's contribution for the first time backstage at that same show. "My hair stylist also does her hair," she said, explaining exactly why people say the two songwriters are alike and have the same hair. "He had also just done her hair for the show, too, so he was just with her, and then he came to me and was like, 'I'm so happy you guys are good.'"
Elsewhere in the interview, Charli coyly admitted that there are more BRAT remixes to come, and that viral hit "Apple" almost didn't make the album. She also revealed that she thinks it "could be cool if I didn't really make music anymore after this," adding, "I'm definitely thinking about it because I really want to act." (She's also set to begin writing her first feature-length film.)
"I don't know," Charli continued after a pause. "I'm just so deep in this, I can't see outside of BRAT, but it's funny. I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest. That would definitely be a pretty big swing."