Lauren Mayberry questioned whether ‘He Said She Said’ would “alienate” Chvrches’ male fans.
The Scottish trio’s recent single is an account of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, and Lauren contemplated whether to release the song or not, before coming to the conclusion that if it were the other way around, a male artist wouldn’t hold back.
Speaking on Jessie Ware’s ‘Table Manners’ podcast, she said: “When we were talking about ‘He Said She Said’ there was a moment I thought, ‘I don’t want to alienate certain people that are listening to the band.’
“I know we have a lot of male fans and then I was like, hold on, in the history of music I don’t think any man ever has thought ‘oh I shouldn’t put this song out from my perspective because it might alienate female fans.'”
Commenting on the track, she said: “‘He Said She Said’ is my way of reckoning with things I’ve accepted that I know I shouldn’t have. Things I pretended weren’t damaging to me. It was the first song we wrote when we started back up, and the opening line (‘He said, you bore me to death’) was the first lyric that came out.
“All the verse lines are tongue-in-cheek or paraphrased versions of things that have actually been said to me by men in my life. Being a woman is f****** exhausting and it felt better to scream it into a pop song than scream it into the void. After the past year, I think we can all relate to feeling like we’re losing our minds.”