Why Lorde’s ‘Green Light’ Is the Ultimate Coming-of-Age Anthem

John Proctor Is the Villain, one of the most talked-about new plays on Broadway, follows a small-town high school class studying The Crucible at the beginning of the #MeToo movement. One of its most memorable—and cathartic—moments is set to the song “Green Light,” Lorde’s lead single on her acclaimed 2017 record, Melodrama. As we kick off a weeklong celebration of the singer in anticipation of her upcoming album release, Kimberly Belflower, the playwright behind John Proctor, reflects on the significance of “Green Light” and why it serves as a quintessential coming-of-age anthem—especially for young women.

When the pre-chorus of “Green Light” hits, the world changes.

At first, Lorde’s transcendent single from her sophomore album details the pain of a relationship ending in all its jagged edges. She uses a minor key and rebels against traditional rhyme structure to prioritize emotional truth over expectation or order: “I know about what you did, and I wanna scream the truth / She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar.” When you’re in the middle of pain, there is no order to it. There is no reason. The first time my heart was broken, it felt like my life changed color. The wreckage seemed to have no end. Familiar places felt foreign. I didn’t recognize the landscape of my own heart.

Somehow, though, time passes. Slowly, strangely, but it passes. The pain doesn’t leave, at least not entirely. But pain is a path, and it leads somewhere new. It crystallizes into different shapes. And then: the pre-chorus. The shift from minor to major. “But I hear sounds in my mind / brand new sounds in my mind.” In this single moment of “Green Light,” Lorde captures the feeling of transformation. Within the first 48 seconds of the song, she takes us on a journey from the lows of an ending to the highs of creation, moving into a beat that makes even the most hardened heart soar.

The creation I speak of is that of being an artist, but also that of being a person. As an artist, I know the particular feeling of moving through pain and arriving at the moment of hearing “brand new sounds.” There were pains inflicted long ago that I carry still, that I’ll carry forever; pains that will always be tender to the touch. (“Honey, I’ll be seein’ you ’ever I go.”) But that pain gave me new tools, new experiences, new modes of expression that I channel into my work. I wouldn’t be the artist I am without the pain I’ve survived. I wouldn’t be able to hear or harness those “brand new sounds.” In a single sonic moment, Lorde gave voice to an alchemy I’ve never been able to put into words.

But you don’t have to think of yourself as an artist to be a creator. We all create our identities, our directions through life. We all know that “brand new sounds” feeling. At a certain point, we each cross the bridge of a specific pain into new territory. And it usually happens for the first time, as so many things do, when we’re teenagers.

“Green Light” was released when Lorde was 20 years old and is the first song on her masterpiece Melodrama. In the last song of the same album, she sings, “I’m 19, and I’m on fire.” It’s no coincidence that “brand new sounds” came from a teenage brain. Everything is brand-new in those years. Everything feels extreme. Sometimes there are multiple opposing extremes in a single moment. As Lorde herself described “Green Light” in a 2017 interview with Zane Lowe: “It sounds so happy, and then the lyrics are so intense, obviously. And I realized, I was like, ‘How come this thing is coming out so joyous sounding?’ And I realized this is that drunk girl at the party, dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend who everyone thinks is a mess. That’s her tonight, and tomorrow she starts to rebuild.”

The reason I was asked to write this piece is because I wrote a play called John Proctor Is the Villain, now on Broadway through August 31. The play centers around a high school English class in rural Georgia studying Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the wake of the early #MeToo movement. The play also (spoiler alert!) ends with two teenage girls performing a choreographed dance to “Green Light.”

Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo dancing to “Green Light” in John Proctor Is the Villain

I knew from the start that the play should end with a dance sequence that doubles as an act of rebellion. This calls back to the girls in The Crucible dancing and casting spells in the woods, but it’s also a way for the girls in my play to reclaim their own bodies, process their trauma, and cultivate joy in the face of a world that has never valued them and doesn’t take care of them. It’s sleepover dances in your best friend’s basement meets ancient witchcraft meets demonic possession. I never had to think about what the soundtrack of the play’s ending should be. It was always “Green Light.” These girls have walked the path of their pain, and it led them here: harnessing their hurt and turning it into magic, into art.

There’s a stage direction in the play’s final sequence that reads, “It starts to look less like a dance and more like an exorcism,” which I wrote from what I feel watching Lorde perform. In the “Green Light” music video, and in her many live performances of the song, she thrashes. She shakes. She jumps. She’s wild, and a little scary. She’s not dancing for other people’s (namely: men’s) consumption of her body; she’s dancing as a mode of pure self-expression. Dance as bodily autonomy. Dance as sacred ritual. Dance as spell.

Lorde during her Melodrama World Tour.

Right before “brand new sounds,” Lorde asks: “Did it frighten you? / How we kissed when we danced on the light-up floor?” And the answer is almost definitely “yes.” Yes, whatever kinds of kissing and dancing that happened with Lorde on the light-up floor absolutely frightened this unnamed person. Teenage girls, in all their big feelings and extremes, are terrifying to people who aren’t teenage girls. Throughout “Green Light,” Lorde invokes that ferocity in her imagery: teeth that bite and screaming truths.

I’ve been “that drunk girl at the party dancing around crying about her ex-boyfriend,” trying to untangle and scream my own truths. I did rebuild. And let me tell you: I needed to dance that dance to know how.