The Louvre

Album: Melodrama (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • This title of this song references the iconic art museum in Paris, France. Lorde is singing about the honeymoon period of a relationship likening it to art.

    But we're the greatest
    They'll hang us in the Louvre
    Down the back, but who cares - still the Louvre


    Lorde's relationship with this person is worthy of being immortalized in a famous museum such as the Louvre.
  • Lorde discussed the song during an interview with The SpinOff:

    "I wanted to [give the feeling of] just like the big sun-soaked dumbness of falling in love and it's like your whole head is like glue, it's amazing. It is like drugs. It's like 'I just want to be by you all the time, I just want to listen to you talk and look at your face do all those dumb things that it does when you talk. It's just like this big dumb joy and it's intense – and I feel like the instrumentation in that song kind of helped it get there."
  • Outside of Bleachers' Jack Antonoff and Lorde herself, John Legend, Frank Ocean and Zayn collaborator Malay and Australian musician Flume also contributed to the production of the track.
  • Lorde explained how Frank Ocean's 2016 Blonde album helped her come up with a suitable musical arrangement to tie in with its lyrical theme of new love. "In this sort of post-Blonde landscape, we can all sort of do whatever we want in terms of instrumentation," she said. "It's exciting. I can use guitars and I can get a big gnarly Flume beat and throw it under water."
  • The Louvre has not always been a museum. Here are some fun facts about the iconic French museum couetesy of The Encyclopedia of Trivia:

    The Louvre emerged as a medieval fortress built by Philip II of France in the 14th century located on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris.

    Between 1360 and 1380, Charles V converted the Louvre Castle into a palace, known as the "joli Louvre" ("pretty Louvre").

    When Queen Catherine de Medici lived in the Louvre, certain rooms were said to be constructed with a network of listening tunnels, so that anything spoken in one room could be heard in another. That way the paranoid queen could scupper any plots against her.

    During his reign (1589–1610), Henry IV created a link between the Palais des Tuileries and the Louvre. The link was completed via the Grande Galerie by architects Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau and Louis Métezeau. More than a quarter of a mile long and one hundred feet wide, this huge addition was built along the bank. of the Seine; at the time of its completion it was the longest building of its kind in the world.

    In 1682 Louis XIV abandoned the Louvre, and moved his court to Versailles to establish his independence from the Paris nobility.

    The Louvre was converted into an Art Museum during the French Revolution with an exhibition of 537 paintings. It opened for the first time on August 10, 1793. Most of its exhibits at the time consisted of treasures confiscated from the royal family or the Church.

    The Louvre has become the globe's most-visited museum, with 35,000 works of art dating from Antiquity to the early modern period. As well as the Mona Lisa, the museum's permanent collection includes masterpieces by European masters such as Rembrandt, Giambattista Pittoni, Caravaggio, Rubens, Titian and Eugène Delacroix.

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