girl in red

One Liner: Extra-confessional bedroom pop

Wikipedia Genre:  Indie pop, lo-fi, bedroom pop, indie rock, dream pop, alternative

Home: Horten, Norway

Poster Position: Late addition
Both Weekends.

Saturday at 2:20 on the Lady Bird Stage.

Thoughts:  Exceedingly confessional music right here.  Her first track on her only album just immediately dives into her emotional issues and chemical imbalance.  Like, she's immediately singing about cutting herself and jumping in front of a bus.  It's kind of a lot, especially when the chorus of the song is kind of sunny and sweet.  A little later she's singing about how she needs to get off because she hasn't had sex in months.  She doesn't hold back on revealing herself!  Speaking of which, one of her singles has a photo of her lifting her sweater (I assume it is her) over her head so that you see her chest.  She really shares a lot!

This is an indie pop project of a 22 year old Norwegian singer-songwriter named Marie Ulven Ringheim.  She originally made music as Lydia X, but then got her new moniker after trying to identify herself in a crowd to a friend via text messages.  I like that origin story.  I'm sure just about everyone has done that before - I'm in the blue hoodie to the left of the VIP section!  I'm in the yellow hat just in front of the chair zone!

Here is an interesting tidbit: "In mid 2020, she became a popular symbol of queer identification on the online platform TikTok, where users would adopt the common phrase, "Do you listen to Girl in Red?" as a way of asking if someone was a lesbian."  That seems like a very imprecise way to gauge lesbianism.  I'm listening to her right now, and am very old, so I wouldn't understand the underlying issues with that question, and then would become a presumptive lesbian.  Freaking TikTok.  Actually, I'm going to go test this on my child.  [actually goes and asks his 13 year old daughter if she listens to the girl in red]  She just gave me a confused look, when I clarified it was a musician, she said "I don't know who sings anything, I just listen."  When I clarified that this was a coded question about her sexuality, she flushed and called me weird.  Fair enough!

Ulven herself says that she thinks it is dope that she became a meme within LGBTQ culture.  Which, I'm sure she does!  But this is a funny bit from an NPR interview: "I realized it was a thing when everyone was commenting, "Do you listen to girl in red" on everything I was posting on TikTok or Instagram, and people DM'ing me like, "Do you listen to girl in red?" I was like, "Um yeah... is the world having a stroke right now or what is happening?" It was really funny."  That would be pretty surreal, to be the artist at issue, but not know what people were talking about with those comments.

Too much talking, not enough actual music!  Her top track is "we fell in love in october," with 251 million streams.  That's a crapload of streams for an indie Norwegian artist!

A 2018 single, that one uses more guitar than most of the tracks on her new album.  Cute little song.  Sounds like something a child wrote - "you look so pretty and I love this view" and then a chorus of "my girl, my girl, my girl, my girl," and "my world, my world, my world, my world," etc.  I mean, she's gotten a quarter of a billion damn streams from it, so she's tapped into the exact thing that a shitton of people want to hear.  I like it too.

Second-most streamed is "i wanna be your girlfiend," with juuuust shy of 200 million streams.

That one isn't as good to me - way more of a bedroom pop guitar song that sounds like she is literally recording it in her bedroom and then adding some effects afterwards.  But, if she's the meme for lesbians, it would also make sense that this could be their theme song to sing to all of their Hannahs who they want to next-level it with.

I'll give you one more, this is the most streamed of the tracks on the new album, with 44.5 million, called "midnight love."

You can tell that she's traded in the guitar-forward sound for more electronic sounds - the whole album is like this.  Less guitar and more synth and drums machines.  I generally like the album.  It makes me a little uncomfortable, with the oversharing and weird topics, but the sound of it is actually really good.

When I started this, I figured there was no way I'd go watch her, but honestly, I liked it.  I might go check her out if the lineup fits right.