“I! Only! Wanna! Live! Forever!” by Fleurie, Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Fleurie is just shy of 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter's majority of listeners, though, come from outside the United States from India, Turkey, Brazil, and Germany to be precise. Last year I talked about about her cover of Sufjan Steven's   "To Be Alone with You," which appears in the Looking for Alaska mini-series. While Fleurie has released many covers including a haunting version Linkin Park's "In the End" and Gary Jules' arrangement of Tears for Fears' "Mad World," the singer also writes original songs and released her fourth LP earlier this year titled Supertropicali. 

CALIFORNIA GIRLS DON'T LOOK LIKE ME. How to describe Fleurie's latest album, Supertropicali? Fleurie describes it on her Spotify page as "a world, an era, a story unfolding, all stitched together in '90s nostalgia, romance, youthful hope, and belonging." Taking inspiration from Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland, and Marie Antoinette, Supertropicali transplants a Michigan girl via Nashville into Los Angeles. Listeners who have followed Fleurie before this album will probably notice the difference in tone, noting how upbeat this record is. Still taking elements of sad-girl, hip hop, and occasional trap lyricism (note the chorus on today's song "I! Only! Wanna! Live! Forever!) make Supertropicali a smooth summertime listen. The rhythmic nature of the songs perhaps can be at least partially credited to co-writer and producer JT Daly, formerly of the band Paper Route. Recall that he was instrumental in changing Pvris' new sound.  Listening to Supertropicali and Prvis' Use Me and the singles from the upcoming album with JT Daly collaborations there are certainly sonic parallels to be found in these recordings, namely in electronics and rhythms. 

SURF ROCK, I LOVE YOU WITH A FIRE. While there are sonic similarities between Fleurie and Pvris, there is certainly a difference between the artists. Whereas Pvris has moved from alternative to dark pop, Fluerie has moved from singer-songwriter to indie pop. The dark, atheistic and sometimes witchy lyrics of Lyndsey Gunnulfsen are very different from the clean-cut former CCM singer Lauren Strahm. But while Strahm's lyrics are very clean, I'd bet money that Supertropicali was influenced by tracks on Lana Del Rey's Born to Die. In fact, the lyrics of tracks like "Millennial  Angel" and "I! Only! Wanna! Live! Forever!" are all about the California dreams and not about the dark realities or the bad boys that color and sometimes poison Del Rey's songs. Lana may have offered us "Diet Mt. Dew," but Fleurie feels like Diet Lana Del Rey, and honestly sometimes we need that diet. Like Del Rey, there's a touch of the dramatic in Fleurie's aesthetic, though rather than a girl who gets kicked out of private school for drinking in the dorm room, Fleurie maintains a kind of grown-up church girl aesthetic. The video for today's song has a melodramatic monologue about a "dark winter of the soul" before Fleurie begins singing the song. There's a little cringe in it, but that melodrama is part of the nostalgia. Maybe the two albums serve as a kind of
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. You may have a preference, but in Fleurie's defense, it's comforting to think about the world in terms of how we saw it when we were young: full of potential. 

 

Read “I! Only! Wanna! Live! Forever!” by Fleurie on Genius