Why Laufey’s “Castle in Hollywood” is the kind of heartbreak we need to talk about
By Loureyna Pablo
It was only "A Matter of Time" before we acknowledged the unspoken heartache of friendship breakups.
Growing distant from friends is hardly pleasant. It might be messy, depressing, destructive; sometimes it could be poetically, tragically silent. Maybe it’s a mix of all that, maybe none of the above. But who really knows when we don’t talk about it with anyone?
It could be hard to segue into that train of thought or conversation, especially when a friendship breakup isn’t exactly treated like the romantic endings we commonly see in the media. Jazz and classical pop singer, Laufey, steps up to bring mainstream music her bittersweet musings of losing a friendship in her latest album.
Back with a more mature take on love, “From the Start” singer Laufey brings the right amount of newness, familiarity and emotional intensity in her new album “A Matter of Time.”
Her usual, popular, bright romance has its place in the album with bossa nova-styled “Lover Girl” — but Laufey also takes time to tackle more complex, somber feelings when love and life don’t turn out very pretty. With the melancholic, simple and intimate acoustics of “Castle in Hollywood,” which shed a light on the complicating heartbreak of a friendship breakup, she invites listeners to connect with her music and their own nuanced feelings.
Lyric: “Still learning to live without you”
“Castle in Hollywood” transports listeners to the graveyard of memories, buried under time passed. Friendships can become just as important as romantic relationships, but because society often treats them as an ordinary part of our lives, they’re often not considered to be as impactful. Laufey’s lyrics touch on how it’s quite the opposite, with lines like:
“Still learning to live without you,”
“It’s a heartbreak/Marked the end of our girlhood,”
“The way I dress, over-obsess/Still just like you.”
The emotions she captures in her song can resonate with anyone, even if not transcribed word for word.
Laufey discusses her song in an interview with Rolling Stone, saying:
“It’s a whole lot harder to be like “fuck you” to another woman who’s changed your life in some way.”
The song could work for any friendship breakup, or even any other close relationship breakup. Why? Because it talks about a love that weaves its way into our everyday.
Our friends impact the big and small of our lives, our interests and habits intertwined. The traces they leave might feel impossible not to accidentally think about (and somehow equally as difficult to intentionally discuss).
Lyric: “Tied together with a string”
The thing is, friendship is a connection that is never truly forgotten. In the end, somehow, someway, there’s still an invisible string that ties them to you, though perhaps lost in new ties, or tangled.
What can help us move forward is to really ruminate on how a friendship affected us, which "Castle in Hollywood” helps listeners do. There’s a beauty in listening to music, which is that you get to experience it repeatedly.
Letting it into our ears and head again and again helps us put feelings into more concrete concepts – a method called “affect labeling” which diminishes the amygdala’s (the brain’s “heart”) response to negative emotional images.
Listening to a song helps one unravel what they’re going through so that they feel less of a knot in their gut. Once we can process everything that happened from the end of a friendship, we come to some acceptance or closure.
Lyric: “We'll never go back to our castle in Hollywood”
I first listened to “Castle in Hollywood” on a call with a newer friend, ranking and dissecting each song from Laufey’s new album. When explaining why I liked this song, I decided to open up about a friendship that I haven’t really talked about with my friends or family: my best friend from high school, whom I’ve grown apart from with distance and time.
She was someone so close to me — I’d share all my thoughts and feelings with her — so my world quietly shifted with the gradual crumbling of the palace our hearts lived in. We still talk, but we won’t ever find ourselves going back to our “Castle in Hollywood” again. It’s something I’m still processing, and Laufey’s song is the same. She doesn’t reach a hopeful conclusion by the end of the song, and her feelings remain melancholic.
Lately, it hurts less when I remember my friendship’s favorite songs, silly arguments or the moments I should've been a better friend. I find myself looking at the remains of what I had last built, and now use it to reinforce the castles I’m building now. Listening to Laufey’s song and talking about the heartbreak with a few of my new friends has helped me grow closer to acceptance (and the people I want to grow closer to).