Editors' Letter
Visual by Vivian Chambers
Dear UA Readers,
Melodrama: mel·o·dra·ma
noun
a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions.
life as a young adult
Lorde’s sophomore album
I’ve been bouncing off this theme idea for months. We all know and love Lorde—her sentimental lyrics, her enticing rhythm, her nostalgic voice. Her first album, “Pure Heroine,” is probably the most accurate musical portrayal of the teenage years. And her second album, “Melodrama,” showed that maybe the next stage in life isn’t so perfect either.
I’m graduating high school this year. I’m moving away from the town I’ve lived in since I was born, and I’m leaving my family, my friends, and basically everything I’ve ever known behind. It terrifies me more than I’d really like to dwell on. Partly because change is just scary—as we all know—and partly because growing up has always been the last thing I wanted to do. And I hate that maybe I’ve just lived through “the good ole days.”
Lorde has taught me something I don’t think I could have lived without knowing through her two albums—every season is just as human, horrible, special, and amazing as the one before.
Every year on my birthday I cry. Because I don’t want to grow up. Last year I didn’t want to give up my sweet sixteen. This year, I’m not ready to be a legal adult and give up my childhood. I’m not ready to give up my “Pure Heroine” stage of life yet.
But then I remember. I remember that though “Pure Heroine” is over, “Melodrama” is beginning. And that’s so so so scary, beautiful, and exciting. So I’m ok.
Then I remember what “Melodrama” is. And it gets better. Because “Melodrama” is that moment in The Perks of Being a Wallflower when they’re driving into the city lights with their arms outstretched and Charlie says, “We are infinite.” And “Melodrama” is Frances Ha ranting about what she wants out of love unable to shut her month. “Melodrama” is chasing for your green light, whatever that may be.
This month is about everything “Melodrama.” Take the word literally if you want: Talk about the drama of living in todays world, the characters that bring drama to your world every day, the suspense, the new, the emotions of living. Or take the word for what it represents to Lorde: A new stage of life. When everything is big, everything is important, everything is everything. It’s your choice.
If there is anything I have learned this past week, it’s that life is precious. It’s fragile, and it can disappear before you know something’s different. Every stage of life—no matter how scary, how dramatic, how new—is everything. Because the present is everything. Hold your loved ones close. Hold yourself close. Hold what you believe in close. There’s nothing else you can do in this life but hold on to what you love and live for the moment.
Use this month to express all your feelings. The terrified ones and the ecstatic ones. We’re all someplace different. This month is about embracing whatever craziness you’re in right now and emphasizing it—make it important. That’s what drama is anyways. Emphasize your life and remind yourself that it’s important.
(Remember that these themes are optional, so if something totally unrelated is calling your name, go for it.)
-Xo, Vivian Chambers, Editor-In-Chief
Hi, UA!
This month’s theme is Melodrama. The feeling of driving with the music way too loud or going for a midnight swim just for the fun of it. It’s haze, confusion, excitement, anticipation, change, growth, growing pains and growing gains, and everything in between. It is emotional, hectic, and feeling widely and deeply.
This month’s theme is heavily based on Lorde’s sophomore album of the same name. (In fact, I’m listening to it while writing this.) She titled it Melodrama because “When you’re twenty, everything feels like the biggest deal in the world and the most permanent thing in the world.”
Music has a way of defining life’s phases. I was fifteen when Ella released this album. I spent the summer before my sophomore year driving through Maui. The comforting green mountains, winding grey roads, and limitless blue sky take me back to a time of being young within a perfect place. This album reminds me of going to McDonald’s in a foreign city at one in the morning and seeing the local teenagers being young, wild, and free. It reminds me of buying my second ukulele in a tiny shop, playing my first chords, learning my first songs, and integrating myself within each strum. I remember the Pacific Ocean and its vastness. I taste the salty waves and feel the hot sand beneath my feet and between my toes. Melodrama is a sensuous journey of discovery. It is an unabashed youth. It is murky and tranquil. Riotous and Serene. Uncertain and Sincere. Rebirth and Reinvention.
I invite you to find your Perfect Place this month. Search for your Green Light, your Louvre. Be a Writer in the Dark or just be you.
I am truly excited for this month, and I can’t wait to see what you create.
-Savanna Chada, Managing Editor
Dear UA reader,
Continuing with the theme of music, this month’s issue is inspired by Lorde’s Melodrama. I really love this album, and I think it resonates with me so much because Lorde wrote it when she was my age: in her late teens, just trying to figure everything out. So, I danced with her to Green Light and cried with her to Liability.
Melodrama is the perfect title for an album about our teenage years, because when I reflect on it, simply being a teenager is one of the most melodramatic things one can do.
These years are filled with exaggerated people and emotions, and exciting events.
So if you’re looking for inspiration for this issue, anything about being a teenager fits into it.
Melodramas are also a genre, in which characters are one-dimensional: the hero or the villain, the good and the bad. I think this is also extremely applicable to everyday life. As a teenage girl, I often feel that I have to fit into one type of stereotype or one friend group. As a society, we often choose to see people one way, instead of learning who they truly are.
If you ever feel this way, have felt this way, or want this to change, please share it with us in whatever form you see fit. And this is just the tip of the Melodrama iceberg, you can take it any way you want to. We love to see it. If you are wondering if I am writing this for you, I am.
-Love, Katherine DeBerry, Editor