Fallen Fruit

The biblical Book of Genesis tells the story of the fall of humankind after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit growing in the Garden of Eden. Though God had commanded them not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they succumbed to the temptation, so He cast them out of Eden. Here, Lorde uses the biblical story of the Fall as a vehicle for her feelings concerning climate change. Speaking to her parents' generation, she laments the bad choices they've made that have spoiled our Eden. By treating nature with disrespect, they are making our world inhabitable.

Through the halls of splendor where the apple trees all grew You'll leave us dancing on the fallen fruit Western Europeans often depicted the forbidden fruit as an apple in art. Like Adam and Eve were punished for disobeying God's command, we are reaping the consequences of our sinful destruction of our world. (Note Lorde uses the past tense "where the apple trees all grew").

Lorde recorded this psych-folk track for Solar Power, an album that celebrates the natural world. In making a record about the environment, she wanted to touch on the climate crisis but she didn't want to come across as a preachy pop star, so this eulogy for our pending environmental collapse is the only protest song on the project. "It's tricky to know how much to go there as a songwriter," Lorde told Spotify. "This is me sort of talking to my parent's generation, being like, 'Do you know what you've done? How could you have left us with this?'"