Maybe there’s something to the fact that Ellie Goulding looks an awful lot like Lana Del Rey on her latest album, Brightest Blue. After all, this is the same musician heavily influenced by the likes of Joni Mitchell (as Del Rey, too, clearly was on Norman Fucking Rockwell)–which, even if you can’t detect immediately through the cloak of her electro beats, is undeniably there. The singer-songwriter in her is allowed to flourish to its utmost potential in a pop-ified version of Mitchell’s brand of self-reflection–folktronica, if you will. Goulding seemed to be laying the groundwork for her fine-tuned sound for a while now, having covered Mitchell’s Christmas song, “River,” in December of last year. And indeed, it bears noting that one of Mitchell’s most iconic records was her own fourth album, Blue. Ellie makes the moniker her own in more ways than one throughout the sonic odyssey produced by Joseph Kearns.
As it is said, sometimes the best thing to do in order to get to the next step or phase of something is simply “Start”–the appropriate title for track one on the record featuring serpentwithfeet. It immediately addresses the change within herself that has occurred since the release of 2015’s Delirium, a record she found catalyzed her loss of a sense of self as it gave in entirely to commercial pop of the anthem-y variety. And as her success mounted, so did the pressure and expectations to perform and deliver on a “product” she didn’t necessarily believe in as much as her management. That sense of wizenedness that comes in early age is manifest in the opening lyric, “I was old when I was young.” The fact that the song deliberately opens with a crowd cheering during one of her major festival performances at the height of touring speaks to the gradual bifurcation of her mind while experiencing this iteration of fame, hence her description, “I separate my colours like a prism/Try to be myself, but I’m stuck in your religion/Love keeps blurring my vision/ can’t beat the narcissism/Think I’m gonna reinvent myself again, wash off all the pain/’Cause it runs away, but I know it stains.”
As much as self-worth is a theme on the album, so is how one’s confidence (or lack thereof) affects the love one is given. This notion manifests on the single, “Power” (the video for which was quarantine kosher). Talking of “beautiful lies on a Friday night” and wondering where she lost the magic with her significant other, she starts to reconcile that the reasons for being in this relationship are not entirely pure on either person’s part, with Goulding speaking to the increasing superficial motives for twenty-first century folk to “couple.”
While Calvin Harris and Disciples may have once asked “How Deep Is Your Love,” Goulding asks, instead, “How Deep Is Too Deep” with a song that explores her unhealthy obsession with a man who gets off on using and abusing her (Skrillex?). Remarking on his own fascination with keeping her around, dangling her for the sheer pleasure of knowing he can, Goulding sings, “You like me in a mess ’cause I always come back to you/You cast me in your thriller just to cut the scene out/Sowing all the seeds, just to bring me a drought/You wanna wash me off, but you want me as your tattoo.” It’s the ultimate statement on the toxicity of the average male who prefers to collect women as trophies until the time he feels he’s found someone “virginal” enough to actually “be with” (until he cheats on her). In this sense, “how deep is too deep” does not refer to his love, so much as her own willingness to go down the rabbit hole of masochism in order to please him, knowing full well the very thing that pleases him is her suffering.
In one of the first overt nods to Imogen Heap (whose “Hide and Seek” Goulding said changed her life), “Cyan” is an interlude, of sorts, that relies on use of Goulding’s manipulated voice as she essentially tells us that we get the love we think we deserve in the form of, “I only knew I would be the strongest version/Of what I was first given/The strongest dose of the love I was given/Sometimes I had to trample with tears in my eyes/Over the things I knew I couldn’t help/Until I was strong enough to carry them with me instead/A route with pain, a route with joy/There should be no delusion of that magnitude/So know the truth I am not locked in my bones/I’ve been changed forever/And it makes the love you’re given change too.”
This is an appropriate segue into “Love I’m Given,” with a sonic intro slightly reminiscent of Christina Aguilera’s “Fall In Line,” the track remarks upon the shift in the form of attention she’s receiving from romantic prospects, noting, “I feel a change in the love I’m given/I’m turning the page on my indecision/And maybe you’ll stay if I overcome/The highs and the lows of the rising sun.” Toward the end, a near a capella, choir-esque feel to the breakdown lends the song an even more earnest quality as it accents Goulding’s raw vocal talent.
The slowed down pace of “New Heights” further discusses Goulding’s journey to detach from the societally imposed desire to feel as though she has to be with someone just for the sake of being with someone. So it is that she croons, “Reaching these new heights/Love without someone else feels right/Love for myself in this new light/There’s something much deeper inside,” later adding, “I’ve got much wiser through the years/I’m searching for, I’m searching for/A higher love.” That higher love being the one she has to have for herself before she can consider what it might mean to take someone else on, that person she chose being Caspar Jopling.
In keeping with the motif of declaring herself a priority where in the past she often did not, “Ode to Myself” is another stripped down track in which Goulding asserts, “I did it for you/It was always for you/Was killing for you/Swapped places with you/Did it for you It was always for you.” The acoustic style of it lends further gravity to the idea that Goulding will no longer be doing “it” for others, but herself first henceforward.
Like Kesha and Cat Power before her, so, too, does Goulding join the company of female musicians with a song called “Woman.” Sustaining the contemplative tempo of the past two songs, the piano-laden composition would make Britney Spears (with her own “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman”) proud as Goulding unearths about herself, “Suddenly, I see an hourglass, it seems so still I wake up and I’m ten years older/Time’s been running like sand/Free-falling through the photographs that paid my bills/I’m done listening to another man’s music.” In the spirit of the record’s theme of self-discovery and acceptance, Goulding concludes of the kind of woman she is with: “I faced my fears till I made it here/Now I don’t know where to stand/Oh, but I know it’s not over/If I’m losing touch/If I love too much/I’ll just leave it up to chance/That’s just the woman I am.”
Things pick up again with “Tides,” which features a slightly Jamie xx influence in its rhythm. And indeed, Goulding commented of writing the song, “This wasn’t a dance record, but I was listening to people like The Blaze and Jamie xx at the time and wanted to make something that was an anti-dance record.” That she most definitely has with this cut, in which she asserts, “I wanna mould in your shape, yeah/You gave me reason to ignite I know the weather could change/Stuck in a permanent high tide/Hold back the lies ’cause I’m needing the truth/I wait for the sun like I’m ready to bloom.”
What would a British white girl’s album (inspired by Joni Mitchell) be without an offering called “Wine Drunk”? Just as “Cyan,” also an interlude, this is the most Imogen Heap-influenced song of all, with Goulding’s vocoder-enriched voice gushing, “You know me so well/Even the person I pretend to be/You hurt me so well.” This transitions into “Bleach” (with an opening that harkens back to Lykke Li’s “Utopia”) an ironically upbeat song that reexamines some of the sentiments explored on “How Deep Is Too Deep,” namely an inability for her to let go of a person she knows is bad for her, with Goulding stating specifically that it’s about “going back to my old habits [and] being like, ‘I want to write about how I literally can’t erase someone from my brain.’” To this end, the bleach plays in with the lines, “What would it take to bleach you?/What would it take to undo?/Five Hennessys to drink you out my mind/What would it have to come to?/Stuck to me like a tattoo.” The symbolism of a tattoo’s permanence once again used as it was in “How Deep Is Too Deep” with the lyric, “You wanna wash me off, but you want me as your tattoo.” Well, Goulding isn’t having it anymore. She’s about to get laser removal.
The lush piano ballad that is “Flux” (sorry Bloc Party, that title is no longer just yours) served as Goulding’s first single for Brightest Blue and fittingly delves into Goulding’s romanticization of a relationship she knows was not right, yet one she still can’t help toying with in her mind as she wonders what might have been were she with this person when she was more secure with herself as she is now. So it is that she sings dolefully, “When I think of you now, I just think of the day we met/Don’t forget me, like I didn’t care/Yeah, I stole from myself just to make you complete,” rounding out the bittersweetness of it all with the chorus, “And I’m still in love with the idea of loving you/It’s a state of flux, but it’s not enough.”
The final track on “Disc One” is the eponymous “Brightest Blue.” With a hallelujah-type intro, Goulding firmly establishes that she’s gotten to a place of contentment, even when the lows still come with the state of stasis. Again acknowledging her past mistakes in terms of placing emphasis on things she shouldn’t have, Goulding croons, “Everything is heightened now/It’s looking so much brighter now/I was lost and now I’m found/Fell off the merry-go-round/I was into politics/Obsessed with things I couldn’t fix.” Now letting go of that which she knows she can’t change (but having the strength to know the things she can), Goulding notes that in order to come to this happy place of “blueness,” this sense of serenity and calm, she had to endure all she did, observing, “There’s no blue in the odyssey/Even in the calmest seas/Now it’s all I wanna be.”
EG.0 a.k.a. “Disc Two” (or Side B, depending) is Goulding’s collection of singles released over the course of the last two years, serving as what she calls her brasher alter ego (though Sasha Fierce she is not). In response to any cynics who might try to say she’s simply showboating by tacking on already released tracks, Goulding assured, “I can’t then just disown them, and pretend they didn’t exist, and it’s important to me to show my craft as a pop writer. You know, I can write big bloody pop songs and sing them quite well, as well.” That she can. The first of six songs, “Overture” is just that: a dramatic one minute and seventeen second instrumental that builds into the frantic “Worry About Me” featuring blackbear. Once more addressing her secureness with herself and who she is in the present, Goulding hits back at a toxic ex who keeps trying to contact her just because she’s “still” single. To this, Goulding retorts to ILYA’s frantic rhythms, “Sayin’ that you care about me/But you just wanna be in my head ’cause you’re lonely/I thought I needed you to feel safe/But now that I’ve been through it, I’m stuck in a good place.”
Again bringing the Imogen Heap vibes, “Slow Grenade” featuring Lauv is Goulding’s continued recognition of having difficulty with letting go of people and relationships she knows are damaging to her psyche, thus, “Waiting, I just keep on waitingFor the final curtain/’Cause I just can’t let go of your love.” And yet, as she sees the metaphorical slow grenade blowing up everything around her, she does nothing to stop it, instead feeling relief that everything is coming to an end. Singing in a triumphant manner, Goulding is jubilant as she illustrates, “Slow grenade is blowing up/My mistakes, so why don’t I/Why don’t I stop it?/Still got time for me to stop it/It’s like a part of me must want it/That’s why I’m not running from it.”
The song that reinvigorated Goulding’s enthusiasm for music two years ago, “Close to Me,” follows, released at a time when Goulding had just gotten engaged to Jopling, who seemed to reignite something within her, as the carnal theme of the song suggests. With the chorus, “And I don’t wanna be somebody without your body/Close to me/And if it wasn’t you, I wouldn’t want anybody/Close to me/’Cause I’m an animal, animal-al like/Animal like you,” Goulding cuts to the quick of what the best of lust and love are all about.
Being that the line between love and hate can often be very thin, it’s only right that Goulding should place “Hate Me” afterward, featuring the since deceased Juice WRLD. A raw study (video included) in the ways in which a love unreturned can also transform into contempt, Goulding taunts, “Tell me how you hate me, hate me, still tryna replace me/Chase me, chase me, tell me how you hate me/Erase me, ‘rase me, wish you never dated me/Lies, tell me lies, baby, tell me how you hate me/Hate me, hate me, still tryna replace me.”
The rhythmic, ultra danceable “Sixteen” seems the best way to conclude a record so entrenched in a message of positivity and exultance, of returning to a youthful state of hope for the future (even though that seems like a lot of poppycock in the present circumstances). On choosing that specific age, so classic and quintessential in its implications, Goulding said, “That age was such a pivotal year for me in many ways and this song is so close to my heart. It takes me back to the reckless days of being a teenager and I hope it reminds us all about the innocence of youth.” So it is that Goulding depicts a love with an intensity that seems only to come when one is experiencing this particular year of adolescence as she urges, “Oh, if you just focus on me/Like we were sixteen/And planning our lives.” Whatever Goulding may have been planning then, it surely must have turned out better than she could have imagined in choosing to bank on herself rather than someone else, especially with this latest output.
