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Lorde Is The Only Person Who Likes The F Train

New Yorkers have been increasingly more irritable due to the fact that the subway system seems to be getting significantly worse with each passing day. Routine delays more or less guarantee it’ll take you an additional 20 minutes to get anywhere and various lines shut down service at exceedingly inconvenient times. According to a recent New York Times article, these issues stem from the fact that trains are often too crowded (New York City is definitely crowded, yes) and also the system itself is old as fuck. The only person who seems to like the MTA right now is Lorde.

Lorde rode the subway with CBS This Morning’s Anthony Mason for a forthcoming episode of the show which will air June 11. During the ride, Lorde told Mason that she thanked the subway in Melodrama’s liner notes, and that much of the album was written while riding the F train. “I wouldn’t have been able to make the record without it,” she said. “I found it such an amazing space to kind of be around people.”

Do you know what happens to people who ride the F train who are not Lorde? This:

Now that’s what I call a New York Moment! Lorde has spoken about her love of public transit in several interviews; here’s a quote from Lorde’s NYT Magazine profile:

While making “Melodrama,” Lorde took lots of subway rides, auditioning rough mixes of songs on cheap earbuds, which helped give her a sense of how the music would sound in daily life. As we rumbled northward, her face was in full fluorescent light, and I wondered if people ever bothered her during these rides. “Nobody recognizes me,” she said. When Lorde does spot someone spotting her, she went on, her move is to smile, place a finger to her lips and mouth a conspiratorial shh. Her thinking is that this gesture, warm and direct in its appeal, will pre-empt any further encounter — “and it usually does.”

So this is why “Green Light” sounds especially good when you’re plowing through Grand Central Station at rush hour. Here’s another tidbit from her Rolling Stone cover story:

In a lot of ways I felt like a little monk, drifting down into the subway, being very solitary and just thinking about the music all the time and not really socializing very much. Every once in a while, a sweet little NYU student would come up to me and say some lovely thing, but really I felt like I was able to lose touch with myself as a person of note, which is a really valuable thing.

I hope to run into Lorde on one of my hell commutes sometime soon. Do you think she’ll ever pull a “it’s showtime, folks!“?

This post originally appeared on Stereogum.