Charli XCX‘s upcoming remix album, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, features a host of big names, including Ariana Grande on the song “Sympathy is a knife.” Charli says she wanted Ariana on that particular track because she’d gotten her first taste of what Ariana’s gone through for years — and she didn’t like it.
“I’m definitely finding more than ever that my words are being picked apart, taken out of context,” Charli tells Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. “I was a bit shocked. And it gave me so much empathy for bigger artists who go through that on a daily basis and have been for years. It’s hard.”
“It’s hard to be constantly scrutinized for things that you have said. It’s hard for your words to be taken out of context and then really feel that you just can’t defend yourself because that would open a whole other can of worms,” she continues. “And so ‘Sympathy is a knife,’ the remix version, it was kind of about me recognizing that and me understanding that you are only really knowledgeable about your own position.”
Charli tells Zane that she’d “gone through a few interviews … where I’d felt perhaps that I was being a little bit manipulated or there were other agendas at play, and I’d never felt that before.”
She then notes, “I had heard that Ari wanted to do something and I was like, ‘This is somebody who definitely knows this feeling more so than me."”
In the new version of the song, the lyrics go, “It’s a knife when they dissect your body on the front page/ It’s a knife when they won’t believe you/ Why should you explain?”
Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat is out Oct. 11.
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