Entertainment
The “Girl, So Confusing” Remix Was Actually Lorde’s Idea
And it “took three days total.”
We’re knee-deep in Brat summer, and luckily for us, there’s no end in sight. Charli XCX wrapped up her solo string of shows with a final Boiler Room DJ set in Ibiza on July 12, and in her latest interview for her Billboard cover story, she discusses the cultural phenomenon behind her critically acclaimed album and gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how “The girl, so confusing remix with lorde” came to be.
Brat, Charli’s much-discussed sixth studio album, is changing what an album rollout looks like. The Brat wall in Brooklyn garnered lots of TikTok and X attention, “Apple,” a hit she says almost didn’t make the album, has its own viral dance, and the sickly “brat green” album color is near-ubiquitous. In the interview, she gave fans the exact Pantone shade of the divisive cover shade (3570-C), but the most surprising admission was that Lorde actually asked Charli if they could “work it out on the remix.”
For the uninitiated, “Girl, so confusing” directly references Charli’s insecurities with being compared to Lorde, stating: “People say we’re alike / they say we’ve got the same hair.” Charli reached out to let Lorde know the song was about her, and Lorde hit her back and asked if she could hop on the song. The rest, as they say, is history, and Lorde’s bracingly honest verse on the remix made the internet go crazy. Lorde explained to Billboard, “I was saying these things to her for the first time. There’s something very brat about that, something very meta and modern. Only Charli could make that happen.”
Charli also told Billboard she’s heading to Poland this summer to write a movie for a few weeks. She’s never one to be pinned down, but always one to be 100% Charli, as Lorde cheekily compares her to Michelangelo carving David: “Michelangelo apparently once said, ‘I’m just going to carve away all that is not David,’ and I feel that that’s what we are getting to witness in real time: Charli saying to herself, ‘I’m going to carve away all that is not Charli.” Here’s hoping that the Charli and Lorde friendship only continues to blossom, and that more pop girlies take notes and work it out on the remix.
