Lorde Shares Satirical Meaning Behind 'Mood Ring' Lyrics

Lorde's third studio album Solar Power is finally here. One of the buzziest tracks on the record is 'Mood Ring,' which takes a hard look at wellness culture.

Ahead of the track's release, Lorde released a statement about the satirical lense through which she wrote the lyrics. "This is a song I am very excited about, it’s so much fun to me," Lorde shared. "Obviously when making this album I did a deep-dive into '60s, Flower Child culture. I wanted to understand the commune life, dropping out from society and trying to start again. That really resonated to me when writing this album."

"One thing that occurred to me as a major parallel between that time and our time is our wellness culture and our culture of spirituality, pseudo-spirituality, wellness, pseudo-wellness," the New Zealand native continued. "Things like eating a macrobiotic vegan diet or burning sage, keeping crystals, reading tarot cards or your horoscope. These were all things that they were dabbling in back then, and that me and my girlfriends are dabbling in today. I was like 'I think there’s a pop song in here.' So this is kind of my extremely satirical look at all of those vibes."

Lorde sat down with Genius, as well, to give a line-by-line breakdown of 'Mood Ring.' The 24-year-old artist said she's been trying to "understand" wellness culture "for a long time." In her quest to understand the cultural shift towards wellness, Lorde created a character for the song's perspective rather than write the lyrics from her own point of view.

"I wanted to paint the image of a privileged young woman sort of feeling like the deck is stacked against her a little bit," Lorde said of her character. She said she wanted to differentiate the narrator from herself right from the jump because the song "is satire and not my personal opinions."

Lorde was drawn to using a mood ring as the centerpiece of this song because it harkens back to the more optimistic 2000s decade. "A mood ring, we know it’s not real, right? Like you look at it, and it’s green and you say, 'Oh! You know my feelings are ‘mixed’ today!' Like even as a kid, I knew that wasn’t real but I still play some stock in it," Lorde explained.

"I think certain elements of wellness culture are like that. Things like reading your star sign, tarot—I’m gonna get so much shit for this—and I do like, believe in my star sign, of course I do—Scorpio—but, you know, there are certain things that we ascribe meaning to because we have to, because we need to," she continued. "To feel 'well' and 'whole' in something like a mood ring felt representative with that to me."

Though for the majority of the song listeners are being guided by Lorde's fictional narrator, she admits she "creeps in" at certain points in the song. The second chorus talks about the hypocrisy of trying to be well, while also participating in certain behaviors that can be harmful to you. For Lorde, she finds this contradiction in the way she tries to eat healthy while simultaneously reading gossip about herself online.

"This is the moment where I creep into the song. I had a moment of realizing like, I’m trying to eat like all these dark leafy greens, but I’m also going on the Daily Mail for two hours at a time," she admitted. "Like, I’m thinking of myself as a well person, but I’m literally rotting my brain. I think it’s a funny dichotomy, and I know a lot of women who are the same, who were like, you know, would not eat dairy but would totally just go on the Daily Mail and like, blow their brains out for hours. Putting nutrients into your body like yeah, on one level that is wellness, but if it only goes that deep, if you’re not thinking about something like your digital diet, for example, that might be a clue as to why you’re not feeling as tip top as that bottle of supplements would have you believe that you should do."

Lorde says she pops up again in the closing lyrics, as well, identifying with the narrator's desire to know that everything is going to work out. "That’s genuine. I do want to look back and feel like it’s all good, like I made the right choices, you know?" she shared. "It just says a wider sentiment. I just sort of ad-libbed that on the mic. I felt so cute, but the sentiment felt legitimate, as well. I realized: 'Oh, this is Ella poking through the satire curtain right now.' I liked that I feature on my own song right at the end."