MONDAY—Nashville
“Are you afraid of heights?”
Daniela Parada, Charli xcx’s personal assistant, leads me through a set of double doors into a cavernous warehouse space. The first thing I see is a hulking black edifice—a mass of black cages formed into a giant pyramid, topped with a gigantic woofer. She leads me over piles of tangled black cables and into the structure itself, a rabbit warren of quick-change rooms and production desks, until we finally get to the second-highest layer, below the woofer, which requires a small lift to access. I feel dizzy looking down into the warehouse, which is dotted with dozens of computer monitors and mixing desks. “It’ll be bigger on Friday,” Daniela tells me absent-mindedly. “It’ll be like, 10 feet taller.”
I’m sweating a little, both from the height and because it’s 100 degrees in Nashville. We’re in an airplane-hangar-like space called Rock Nashville, a state-of-the-art complex where most country stars and some pop stars come to rehearse arena and stadium shows with full production. Charli and her team are here preparing for her biggest performance to date: A headline slot at Lollapalooza for 100,000 people, a week after the release of her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film.
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Henry Redcliffe
The show, which precedes the Music, Fashion, Film arena tour, is also Charli’s largest production, complete with a live band, 20 dancers, and enough pyro to burn down Music Row. The performance is both stark and sobering—thanks to the emotional quality of Music, Fashion, Film, and the show’s centerpiece, a nerve-frying performance of “House,” from Charli’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack—and at times, as is de rigueur for Charli, a total rager. But it’s a lot more poised than the put-the-club-in-an-arena dictat of the Brat shows.
“This show is a lot more filmic, I suppose,” Charli tells me later, smoking a Capri as the sun sets. It reads as her most considered show, which, like the album, taps into the existential nature of making art. “I think I was responding to the caricature of what certain people saw me as after [Brat,]” she says of the album’s shift in tone. (A stream of models filters past us into a series of sprinter vans. “Quite fab, right?” she says offhandedly. “It’s sort of like a school trip.”) “There are personality traits that become identifiable with an artist after they do something that people connect with, and those things are all true, but artists, like all humans, are multifaceted beings. I was like, ‘It’s funny that those things—partying and drugs and sunglasses—are what people think of me.’”
