Running on the spot in a dream.

This feels good right now...

I’ve been in a state of overwhelming creativity of late, so much so that I feel like I’m running on the spot in a dream. There are so many ideas pouring out of me that sometimes I don’t even know where to begin. My friend Georgia and I were recently talking about how our preferred superpower would be the ability to conjure more time. Ideally every week would be 8 days long instead of a pathetic 7. This would hopefully allow for us to live out all our creative fantasies with ease and still leave time for us to rot a day away in bed if we happened to be hungover, which in my case is highly likely.

Feeling creativity in abundance is such a fucking blessing and relief. It doesn’t even matter if the ideas are good or not, it just feels euphoric to feel the fountain flowing again. After my previous album, brat, I had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to make music anymore. When I vocalized this, George said “Yeah, but you always feel this way. We all do.” And he’s right, we do, but it felt so potent this time, sort of like being hit by a truck and left on the side of the road to bleed out.

I find when there’s such an influx of joy and passion and vitality in creating an album (the songs, the visual language, the packaging, the live show, the performance of the whole thing) there is naturally a feeling of emptiness that follows once it’s out in the world. Perhaps the giving birth analogy applies but I’ve never done that so I wouldn’t really know. In my mind you get pregnant, you grow the baby, you carry the baby, you give birth to the baby, people want to meet the baby and then you have to spend your time keeping the baby alive and caring for it eternally. But what if birthing the baby in part makes you lose your uniquely intimate connection to it and therefore changes your purpose slightly? What if you don’t want your entire life to be about one damn baby? Obviously to most people a baby is not the same as an album, but to me it kind of is. Creating art is my one true love that I will never desert and no matter how rough things get, I’ll always be there standing by its side. Clearly I’m not ready to be a mother.

What I’m basically saying is that when a body of work that I have nurtured and cared for is thrust out into the world, the umbilical chord is cut and naturally everyone begins to project the work onto themselves. The meaning is morphed, personalized and applied to each individuals’ own life - as it should be! That’s obviously the point. I’m not saying this negatively more just factually. My purpose and involvement in the work itself is suddenly altered. It is less ‘mine’ and more ‘everyones’. When this moment happens I normally go searching elsewhere for fulfillment. But with brat, my latest baby, people seemed to care about her more than usual. So I stuck with her and watched her grow. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, I reached new highs and new lows and both were equally important. But by the end of the process I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already been sat with for years prior. I still love her, don’t get me wrong but I was itching to move on and was simultaneously frustrated that I was so depleted that I couldn’t. I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren, I was running on the spot in a different kind of way. I couldn’t really even listen to music without feeling depressed. Everything felt monotonous and boring, even if it wasn’t.

In early December 2024 I got a text from an unknown number that turned out to be Emerald Fennell. We had previously shared the same glam team and had met once at a party in a house by the Chateau Marmont but other than that our paths hadn’t really crossed. The text felt out of the blue but obviously intriguing. I had heard through the grapevine that she was making an adaptation of Wuthering Heights and so when she sent me the script to read I devoured it instantly. I was in London at the time, it was freezing and miserable and getting dark at around 4pm, which felt fitting. I began to sink into this reimagined world of Wuthering Heights and I suddenly began to feel… inspired. I was immersing myself in a story that was not my own, a story that was steeped in history, a story that had existed since 1847 (tysm Emily Brontë). I was purely a voyeur and I was enjoying being one. The language of this world felt so opposite from the world I had been inhabiting for the past 2 and a half years. I began to feel a sense of freedom again.

I called Emerald and asked her what she was hoping for from my read of the script. She coyly suggested “A song?” and I suggested “An album?” because why not? I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar. Without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight, it was all totally other from the life I was currently living. I was fucking IN.

As some of you may know I’m currently feeling more inspired by film than I am by music. Film is where my creative brain seems to be gravitating. I’m enjoying acting, I’m enjoying writing, I’m enjoying watching and I’m above all enjoying discovering a new craft. Those things feel really enriching and instinctual to me at the moment but also music is a limb I will probably never fully be able to cut from my body despite trying quite hard to do so at points. When Emerald approached me with an open mind and a total willingness for me to explore I thought… ok I can do something cool here. I can write songs from a different perspective and I can think about these songs as purely serving the film they’ve been written for. For me that’s a totally different approach and finding a new approach always feels like a lifeline to a new way of creating. This collection of songs is an album, and sure, my name’s on the credits, but is it a Charli xcx album? I don’t even know. Nor do I really care to find out. All I know is that it’s a celebration of my freedom as an artist right now and that I feel passionate about what I’ve created and how it’s been created. I also know that I’m enjoying talking about the work here in long form. When I listen to this music, in ways it takes me back to my first album, True Romance. There’s something nostalgic about it, something cyclical, like I’m re-embracing the gothic and my earlier touch points. I’m writing through the lens of the screenplay I read and only occasionally checking in with my own internal narratives. Most likely it’s not something I will tour. I’d just like the songs to live as songs, within and adjacent to the film.

I made this album mostly with Finn Keane. From the very start of our process we were discussing the Todd Hayne’s documentary about The Velvet Underground and in particular this one quote from John Cale where he describes that the main sonic rule of creating songs for the band was that all things had to be both “elegant and brutal”. We started to live by this description as we created songs for the Wuthering Heights album throughout most of this year. Finn came with me on tour and we rented a studio space most days. During one recording session in Austin the seeds of House were born. At first we weren’t really sure what the song was. We kind of put it in a drawer and didn’t look at it for a while. But then, in August we reopened the drawer while we were working at our friends’ studio in LA and that’s when something clicked for me. I was like “We need John Cale” and to be honest in that moment I wasn’t confident we’d get him. After searching around for a while we did manage to eventually connect. Another unknown number, another serge of creativity. John called, I answered, we spoke and I felt inspired. I offered the idea of a reciting a poem and he went away to think about it and a few days later he sent something back. Finn and I listened. We went through a variety of different emotions before landing on: ok, this is brilliant. I wanted opposite, I wanted other and I had found what I was looking for. To be on a song with one of my heroes is quite frankly completely magical and totally unexpected - running on the spot in a dream kinda vibes. I’m happy to stay here for a while.

If you’re still here reading all this, thank you. I don’t often talk about my work in this way but with these songs it just felt right.