“I honestly think that having your heart broken is the closest thing to death that we will ever experience,” says FLETCHER as she discusses her music and love life, which at this point, are fully intertwined. Since January, the 25-year-old has been steadily climbing the charts with “Undrunk,” an unfiltered post-breakup letter to her ex with the clever hook, “Wish I could get a little un-drunk so I could un-call you / At five in the morning, I would un-fuck you / But some things you can’t undo.” Now, she’s keeping the narrative rolling with “If You’re Gonna Lie,” a prequel to her breakthrough hit, that lets listeners hear why the relationship fell apart in the first place.
“I poured you a glass of wine and drank it for the second time,” she begins, setting the scene. “Then 7pm turned to 10 / I’m still alone and my lips are red.” The chorus is even more revealing, as she pleads, “So if you’re gonna lie, do it in my bed / If you’re gonna lie, make it worth it.”
FLETCHER wrote “Undrunk” and “If You’re Gonna Lie” on consecutive days at a studio in New York’s Koreatown. That was over a year ago, when she was “super fresh” out of that pivotal, painful breakup.
“It was a situation where I was cheated on, and ‘If You’re Gonna Lie’ is about that denial phase of a relationship where you know things are getting kind of sketchy,” FLETCHER told MTV News. “You know they’re cheating on you and texting other people, but you would rather have them lie to you and lie to yourself than have them not be in your life.”
That anguish is illustrated in the track’s accompanying visualizer, which was filmed in Joshua Tree, California, at the same time as her “Undrunk” video. Interspersed between scenes of her and her ex in sunnier times, we see FLETCHER distressed and spiraling, singing her heart out in a motel bathroom.
“‘Undrunk’ sort of highlights the nostalgia of being in a relationship and what that felt like, and then ‘If You’re Gonna Lie’ is the moment when you’re by yourself and just feel really crazy,” she explained. “Like when you’re in the bathroom, curled up on the floor, bawling your eyes out. I think love makes you do really crazy shit. It makes you feel insane, and I just wanted to capture that feeling.”
The story set in motion by “Undrunk” and “If You’re Gonna Lie” will keep unfolding on FLETCHER’s forthcoming EP, which she says is all about that one relationship. And, as you might’ve guessed, there will be no details spared — each song represents a specific moment that happened to her. “Like, I remember one night,” she said, “the person that I was dating didn’t come back until, like, 8:00 in the morning and shut their phone off, and I just knew. I knew that something was happening.”
As tough and arguably masochistic as revisiting a breakup sounds, it’s so far giving FLETCHER her best music to date — not to mention, the closure she needed to move on.
“For a long time I thought it would be really hard, but I came out on the other side of it,” she explained. “To be on the other side of that now, and to have found love again… and most importantly, I found out how to love myself. I survived that, and I just want to let other people know that you are going to be OK.”
