Charli XCX has said she’s “currently feeling more inspired by film than by music” after being left “stuck, empty and barren” after ‘Brat‘.
The singer has started a new Substack, where she wrote about the process of making Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack after the huge success of ‘Brat’.
She professed that it has been a “fucking blessing and relief” to be experiencing “overwhelming creativity” after making ‘Brat’, where she “had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to make music anymore.
“When I vocalized this, [husband and The 1975 drummer] George [Daniel] 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,” she wrote.
She went on to speak about her experience of touring ‘Brat’, writing that by the end of ‘Brat’, “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 [Brat], 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,” Charli wrote, adding that she felt like “I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren”.
Charli went on to write about how Wuthering Heights and acting has revitalised her creativity, saying: “I’m currently feeling more inspired by film than I am by music. 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.”
Though she said that “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,” writing for Wuthering Heights allowed her to “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,” she continued. “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.”
So far, Charli has previewed her Wuthering Heights soundtrack with the “elegant and brutal” single ‘House’ featuring John Cale.
Charli has expressed her love for The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed in the past, adding that she has wanted to “make a Lou Reed record” after ‘Brat’ and calling the band’s 1967 debut album ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ the “apex of fine art” last year.
She added that she reached out to Velvet Underground bandmate Cale after his quote from a Velvet Underground documentary – in which he said that any song by the band had to be both “elegant and brutal” – stuck with her.
“When the summer ended I was still ruminating on John’s words,” she said in a press statement. “So I decided to reach out to him to get his opinion on the songs that his phrase had so deeply inspired, but also to see whether he might want to collaborate on any. We got connected, we spoke on the phone and wow… that voice, so elegant, so brutal.”
Elsewhere, Luigi Mangione listened to Charli XCX and Taylor Swift in prison before being confronted by an inmate.
