One of my favourite songs on Lorde’s second album Melodrama – released to much fanfare earlier this year – is “The Louvre.” It tells a story of the beginnings of young love so vivid and real you feel like you could reach out and touch it, and then squash your fingers into it. It’s beautiful.
The track’s title comes courtesy of a couple of lyrics that describe the feeling of being untouchable – one of two people in on a secret that nobody else knows – which often accompanies first or early love: “We’re the greatest; they’ll hang us in the Louvre,” Lorde sings. “Down the back, but who cares? Still the Louvre.”
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It’s a line that many picked out in reviews of the album (which kind of smacked to me of male critics’ disbelief that a girl could be musically talented, pretty and funny, but that’s a story for another day), and fans seemed to take to it, as well. So much so, that one intrepid Melodrama-lover, Nina Richard, actually hung the cover art in the Louvre. Seems fitting, I think.
Nina writes on Twitter that she took the album “on a journey through time and space, from Antiquity, passing by Renaissance, to Modern Times,” which is exactly what it deserves. After all, even if it was only there “very quickly,” it’s still the Louvre.
READ MORE: On Youth, Pain and ‘Melodrama’
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