Saying your new album is your “most personal yet” is the oldest pop cliche in the book. It’s an easy – or lazy – way to say that fans should be invested in your next record without telling them why, exactly; a tease that buying a copy of the album will get them ever-so-much-closer to the inside of their favourite star’s head. It’s a line used by the media as much as by stars themselves; a cursory Google of “most personal album yet” will bring up examples ranging from Adele to Stormzy to Post Malone. Sometimes, the descriptor is accurate – I would say that Lana Del Rey’s new album actually is her most personal yet – but often it’s what you deploy when you have nothing else interesting to say.
That’s why it was so charming when, at a Q&A earlier this week, British pop singer Ellie Goulding went on record to say that her forthcoming album Higher Than Heaven was her “least personal” album ever. “In the best possible way, this album wasn’t taken from personal experiences, and it was such a relief and really refreshing to not be sitting in the studio going through all the things that happened to me and affected me,” she said. “It’s the least personal album, but I think it’s the best album because I got to just explore other things about myself. I just really, really enjoy writing; really enjoy being a singer.”
This is a funny and knowing comment from someone who’s been through enough promotion cycles to recognise hoary pop cliches. It’s a breath of fresh air because, now more than ever, singles are treated like marketing tools for personal celebrity – commentaries that only really work in tandem with a media narrative.
Miley Cyrus’s Flowers hit No 1 on the US and UK charts, helped by tabloids and stan accounts intent on “decoding” the hidden messages about Cyrus’s ex Liam Hemsworth contained within; Shakira’s comeback hit with Bizarrap was praised more as a winning shot in her feud with her ex, Gerard Piqué, than as an actual song. Of course there’s a long precedent for this – Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River being one example – but it seems as if many of this year’s biggest hits were made with virality in mind, more than durability or feeling, which Goulding says is her current priority: “[This record] is an escape … it’s designed to dance, to feel free and to feel like anything is possible.”
The lyrics to Miracle – a collaboration with Calvin Harris that could reach No 1 this week and dethrone another ultra-personal anthem, Ed Sheeran’s Eyes Closed, in the process – are endearingly devoid of specificity: “Are you too cynical / To believe in a miracle / That just slipped through my hands / But could you take a chance for me?” It reads like a horoscope – it could mean anything to anyone – and, helped along by its nostalgic trance beat, creates a light, heady feeling that’s markedly different to slogging through ultra-referential pop hits.
At a time when gossip sites have found a new niche writing full-blown explainers about the real-life stories behind songs, Goulding’s devotion to escapism is refreshing. For many people, this is pop music’s prime function – but it’s hard to feel a sense of escape when you need to comb through online annotations to understand a song’s meaning. This tendency to write songs that only bear weight if you know a lot about their creator has crept into indie music of late, too: much of the recent debut album by Boygenius chronicles the friendship between the band’s members, which makes for awfully dull listening if you’re not a member of Boygenius.
A few years ago, it felt as if maybe we were beginning to exit this era in which we’re expected to perceive pop music as documentary – around the time Taylor Swift, queen of ripped-from-the-headlines pop, stated in no uncertain terms that her albums Folklore and Evermore contained made-up stories. But the success of Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License, which was subject to exhaustive tabloid stories and TikTok analyses about its real-life grounding, probably signalled to waning stars like Cyrus and Shakira that there was big money in scattering their songs with easter eggs.
The real-life subjects of these songs, as famous as they may be, have no say over their dirty laundry being aired in such a public way, and no control over the fans who then see it as a duty to target them online. Joshua Bassett, who Driver’s License is supposedly about, has said that he suffered debilitating anxiety and was hospitalised for heart failure after the song’s release, health conditions he chalks up to the overwhelming torrent of hatred and death threats he received from Rodrigo’s fans.
I haven’t yet heard Goulding’s new record, but its low-stakes presentation is greatly appealing in a landscape which prizes songs that require 20-minute YouTube explainers. I’m not going to deny that it’s extremely fun to decode, say, the latest Ariana Grande song – but sometimes, you just want to dance.
