Lorde’s “Fallen Fruit” Lyrics Meaning
“Fallen Fruit” is one of those cases where it would be best to instantly resort to the artist’s explanation of what the song is about. And Lorde has described this narrative, if you want to refer to it as such, in two ways.
One of the explanations centers on the narrator “describing an escape to somewhere safe that takes place in the future when our world has become uninhabitable”. And the other rather features the vocalist “sort of talking to (her) parent’s generation, being like ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’”
But in either case, the main subject is in fact climate change, i.e. global warming. So based on that first explanation, the reason why the world has become uninhabitable would be because the environment is messed up.
And in the second, what her parent’s generation has done that would have been so irresponsible is something like carelessly consuming the world’s natural resources or whatever it is Lorde deems as the root cause of climate change.
And the reason we wanted to get all of that out of the way from the onset is because one would be hard-pressed to conclude that this song is in fact about environmental catastrophe – or even the environment for that matter – based solely on the lyrics.
In fact even with that foreknowledge in mind, it is still proving a bit challenging connecting the wording of Fallen Fruit to that concept. But going a bit out on a limb (no pun intended), obviously the titular “fallen fruit” itself is symbolic of the detrimental changes to the environment which have transpired in recent history.
“Fallen Fruit”
Fallen Fruit was introduced to us as part of the playlist of Lorde’s album Solar Power on 20 August 2021. This is a project whose title was obviously influenced by environmental concerns itself, even though, after thus far covering about half of the songs thereupon, we have yet to come across any besides this one based on such a topic.
However, Lorde did go out of her way to package the album using a method which is more environmentally-friendly than the industry norm.
This is a song which Lorde began writing on a plane to Los Angeles to meet Jack Antonoff, who at the time is one of top behind-the-scenes’ men in the music industry. Antonoff, who worked on the entirety of Solar Power, is also credited as a writer of this song alongside the vocalist. And both of them are acknowledged as producers of the track.
The labels behind this song are Republic and Lava. And the first time Lorde performed it live was on 21 August 2021, in New York City’s Central Park at a festival known as SummerStage.
