page_title: Liability (song)
section_title: Background and development
hierarchical_section_title: Liability (song) / Background and development
caption_attribution_description: English: Rihanna performing Diamonds World Tour at the Air Canada Centre, 19 March 2013.
context_page_description: "Liability" is a song recorded by New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde, from her second studio album Melodrama. Lorde co-wrote and co-produced the track with Jack Antonoff. It was released on 10 March 2017, by Republic Records as the album's first promotional single. Sonically, "Liability" served as a dramatic shift from the album's lead single "Green Light", which was released a week prior. It is a pop piano ballad, which is accompanied with organs and guitar strums in the background. The lyrics detail the consequences and scrutiny Lorde's friends received from the media as a result of her new-found fame and how she learned to live comfortably by herself.
  Reviewers praised the song's lyrical content and Lorde's vocal delivery. Lorde revealed that she was inspired to write "Liability" after an emotional cab ride while she listened to Rihanna's song "Higher" from her 2016 album Anti. The song had minor chart placements in the United States and the United Kingdom, placing at 78 and 84, respectively. The track centers around the themes of loneliness, self-love and consequences of fame from Lorde's perspective.
context_section_description: Lorde revealed to a crowd at a secret iHeartRadio concert she held in Los Angeles that "Liability" was inspired after a night she became "so overcome with anger and emotion". She walked about 8 to 10 kilometers (around five to six miles) before ordering an Uber to take her home. The singer stated that she cried as she listened to Rihanna's song "Higher" from her 2016 album Anti because she felt a specific feeling of "being 'too much' for somebody."
  In an exclusive podcast interview with The Spinoff, she confessed that this track was the first ballad she ever recorded and was different from her work on Pure Heroine (2013). She stated that the chords of the song felt "classic" as one could sing a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young or a Don Henley song over them. Lorde described the writing process of "Liability" as "therapeutic" as she felt that she said everything about herself that could hurt her "coming from other people". In her words, she wrote the "script to the worst possible outcome." She revealed that one line in the second verse was changed from "Every summer dream is eating me alive in the end" to "Every perfect summer's eating me alive until you're gone". Lorde elaborated more on the meaning behind this specific line, stating that she used the word "summer" as a metaphor for youth.
  Lorde confessed that she rejected the song after first writing it. "Liability" was intended to be a rap skit. The singer said she wanted to find a "fancy sound designer" to put the listener in a party. In there, she wanted to evoke the feeling of her walking away from said party down a hall, find a room, shut the door and then deliver a verse and chorus of the song. She also intended to have dialogue within "Liability", with someone calling her name and Lorde walking out of the room as the listener stays inside waiting for the next song to play. She contemplated changing the framing of the track but refrained from doing so. Lorde revealed that in the track, there was a specific note that was "deliberately missing", meant to feel like taking a breath or as if one would skip a step downstairs. She spent a couple of days in Waiheke to write the song.
caption: Lorde credits Rihanna's "Higher" as inspiration for writing "Liability"
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