Big Question: Who IS Ellie Goulding?

The possibly totally genuine but also possibly totally contrived “evolution” of one pop singer.

It’s time to talk about Ellie Goulding, because I just can’t keep my questions to myself anymore.

In Vulture’s most recent edition of “Best Songs of the Week” one of their selects was Ellie Goulding’s new cover of the 2001 track “Just in Case” by Jaheim. The first sentence of the song’s introductory paragraph goes like this: “Ever get the sense that Ellie Goulding can’t quite make up her mind about what kind of pop star she wants to be? There are really no rules to this thing nowadays, but she seems stuck somewhere between big Max Martin radio hits and electro-R&B SoundCloud jams.”

I mean… Right?? The hive mind at Vulture is probably the most crack team of pop culture analysts working today. Every writer just gets it, and in this case they’ve touched on a question I can’t stop asking whenever I hear Ellie Goulding lately (lately as in the last few years). And that question is essentially: “But, why?”

First Album: Statement Piece… ?

Ellie came on the scene in a mainstream way with her album Lights in 2010. It had the title track and “Starry Eyes” and that lovely cover of “Your Song”. She was a pixie nymph creature with a singular voice and face. There was a dreamy joyfulness to her Euro dance jams. She had sometimes pink and sometimes silver hair and she was spunky and confusing-pretty. Her music videos were just her and the camera and bad graphics, because that’s what you do when you have no budget.

The fingerless gloves. The cotton candy tresses. Her music wasn’t pioneering a new sound, but it felt charming and fun. The Pitchfork review did a great job of summing up the album’s unoffensive delightfulness by saying, “at its best Lights feels remarkably uncontrived, cantering across genres, following personal whims and visions rather than marketing agendas.”

More importantly, though, it was also incredibly prescient with its description of Ellie as a artist: “There’s no high concept or big personality, it doesn’t ride any particular fashion wave or nostalgia agenda. Instead critics have seized upon a sense of contrivance, the idea that UK pop culture is meme-splicing from the recent past, and that Goulding has been cynically designed to hitch the nu-folk fad of 2008 (Laura Marling) to the 1980s pop vogue of last year (Little Boots) and achieve full-spectrum media approval from Mojo to Popjustice. And so she’s getting shot by both sides: not folky enough for purists, not sensational enough for the pop crowd, but mid-market, middlebrow — the new Dido.”

And that’s the constant question with Ellie Goulding. Is her sound driven by a passion for a specific musical identity, or is this sound just the one that came most easily for her? And furthermore, is this her sound because it’s what lives in her artistic heart, or because it’s what fits the zeitgeist?

But hell, Lights was six years ago at this point, and you can’t judge a career on a first album alone. Besides, she was in her early 20s and dating Skrillex, who was way bigger than her at the time, and had a partially shaved head. We experiment! So how is it that six years later we still don’t really have a clearer picture of what “an Ellie Goulding song” means?

Second Album: Maturation of the Sound…?

Ellie earned her highest Billboard chart performance to date with her first single, “Lights”, which made it to number 2. The best performer off her sophomore album, 2012’s Halcyon, was “Burn”, and that topped out at number 13. Overall, Halcyon was a lot like Lights, except slightly less interesting because we already had Lights.

As Consequence of Sound put it in their review, “she carved out an album that sounds exactly how a modern pop record should, complete with human weaknesses and synthetic production that smells like new action figures (or, fresh leather interior for the adults). With help from the album’s core producer Jim Eliot, Goulding proves to have a death-grip-grasp on today’s sound, similar to M83’s Anthony Gonzalez but dissimilar in that she’s still miles away from his keen foresight. That’s just it, though: Halcyon works for this hour, but it’s tomorrow that Goulding should be emotionally torn over.”

The important part of this review for my money is the “should”, because the takeaway from most Ellie songs is that they sound exactly like they “should” in any given year. Which is totally fine. Ellie Goulding does a fantastic job at sounding current and doing it with an undeniably catchy flair, but what is an artist’s musical identity if they always just sound like “Now”?

Up through Halcyon I mostly just took it in stride. I liked the music and my inability to truly classify her in the pop taxonomy didn’t feel like a pressing need. But then came phase three of her career, which we’ll just call the Official Soundtrack Era.

Interim Career: Professional Emotion Synthesizer

Goulding’s talent for sounding eminently contemporary hit satire status between Halcyon and her latest release, Delirium. In that four year period she put out an EP’s worth of songs custom made for the trendiest movie soundtracks possible. Alex Patsavas-style soundtracks (sometimes literally). It started in 2012 with “Bittersweet” for Twilight: Breaking Dawn. Then the next year she contributed “Mirrors” to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. In 2014 it was “Beating Heart” for Divergent followed by “Love Me Like You Do” for 50 Shades of Grey in 2015. Yes, she really was represented on all three major YA screen properties.

WHAT?! How?!

As Young Adult novels became ubiquitous screen fodder in the early 2010s, so too did Ellie Goulding’s music in the collective consciousness. And the pairing of the two was so right as to be frightening. It’s almost like they started making movies to fit her sound, and not the other way around. You’d hum the songs constantly but have no real association with their provenance. You just knew the tracks in your bones because they were fucking everywhere — on the radio, in TV commercials, rolling during the credits in theaters, playing faintly over supermarket PA systems. When the first trailer for The Longest Ride came out I described it as “the new one that’s being marketed with an Ellie Goulding song.” It wasn’t even Ellie Goulding. It was a slightly shitty cover of Rihanna’s “Stay” and it might not have even been a woman singing. But it didn’t matter! Because Ellie Goulding had turned into a cinematic genre and everyone knew what I meant. Truly a triumph of branding.

All these movies were marketed to become sensations. Blockbusters! LIFE-CHANGING ROMANTIC EPICS! But besides Catching Fire, most of them came and went with the minimal requisite fanfare, and each gave way to a sequel more disenchanting than the one before it.

You saw the movies, but do you remember them? Do you care? What were they actually trying to accomplish beyond being good enough and making lots of money?

But regardless of how fleeting the movies were, for three solid years Ellie had an identity, a musical niche that belonged almost exclusively to her. She was the sound of broad appeal page-to-screen adaptations targeted at women ages 15 to 25. A singer so skilled at being the voice of everyone and no one suddenly became the manifestation of young ladies in extraordinary circumstances (e.g. the post-apocalypse, psycho-sexual prisons, inter-species war between vampires and werewolves) at the threshold of their sexual awakenings. That may sound like a deeply specialized category, but make no mistake: It’s probably the most highly motivated consumer demographic in the developed world. Girls with feelings, disposable income and a hopelessly devoted man being dangled in front of them like a baited hook — BOOM.

But the YA fad passed, and for whatever reason Ellie didn’t appear on the soundtrack for Divergent: Insurgent. It’s better this way. The director of the first movie, Neil Burger, described Goulding as “the inner voice of Tris”, and music supervisor Randall Poster said he hoped to “maintain Ellie as the voice of Tris” if he returned for the sequel. But the thing is: Tris is an absolutely terrible character and someone as pleasent seeming as Ellie Goulding shouldn’t have to be her IRL avatar. Bullet dodged!

Current Incarnation: Stone Cold Pop Songs

So now it’s 2016 and Ellie’s third studio album, Delirium, came out at the end of last year, and it feels every bit like the deliberate pop takeover album she planned for it to be. She enlisted THE Max Martin as a producer and in a statement about the release she full stop owned up to her chart topping intnetions, “A part of me views this album as an experiment — to make a big pop album. I made a conscious decision that I wanted it to be on another level.”

As much as Goulding’s first single from the album, “On My Mind”, feels every bit like that very deliberate effort to be major, the song has so far peaked at 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. The pink hair is long gone. The pixie punk aesthetic has been traded out in favor of legit glam. (Platinum or pastel, though, her hair always has been and always will be the center of her power. Respect.) Ellie looks and sounds great, per usual, but whatever identity she was kind of forming between 2010 and Delirium got side-lined to make way for pure exposure.

She’s not the only one. Pop’s reigning king of nihilism and drug-soaked debauchery, The Weeknd, went from dark alley R&B creeper to Top 40 sell-out sensation after telling a label rep flat out, “I absolutely wanna be the biggest in the world.” (In a fit of delusion he also said, “These kids, you know, they don’t have a Michael Jackson. They don’t have a Prince. They don’t have a Whitney. Who else is there? Who else can really do it at this point?’’ Show down, bro.) He even hired… wait for it… Max Martin! But the thing about The Weeknd’s nakedly commercial move is that he really is a standalone figure, and he pushed mainstream radio to its limits with every offering from Beauty Behind the Madness. No one out there is wondering what Abel Tesfaye is selling. But I, for one, will remember and treasure 2015 as the year pop stars dropped the pretense and just said, “I want a Swedish song-making Jesus to make me a global phenomenon.” Bless.

Stereogum talked about Goulding’s identity issues in its review of Delirium, effectively summing up the arc of her career in the process. In the Lights era she was “sorta cool and kinda famous, but not enough of a cause célèbre to dominate online discourse nor popular enough at radio to be a household name.” Halcyon raised her profile a little among the populace, but mostly turned her into a festival all star who “seemed stuck in some netherworld between blog stardom and actual stardom, not fully reaping the benefits of critical acclaim nor commercial conquest.”

Sitting in this kind of purgatory, such a calculated desire to obtain Big Deal status is completely understandable. Get yours, Ellie! But as Stereogum points out, the whole endeavor just rings a little… hollow :( On Delirium: “‘Love Me Like You Do’ is the template — its massive scale, yes, but also its strict refusal to deviate into anything resembling personality. She’s even more of a cipher here than she was in her EDM days.”

The writer goes on to say that this doesn’t make the songs bad by any stretch, it just makes them expendable, a collection of possible singles without an inevitable one. And in comparing Goulding to her contemporaries — artists like Taylor Swift, The Weeknd or Adele — he points out that the biggest difference between her and the rest of the pack is a point of view, “What they have in common with their fellow A-listers is what Goulding lacks now more than ever: a strong sense of self.”

Well What Now?

This is all to say… I don’t know what to say! I like Ellie Goulding! I root for Ellie Goulding. I wish Ellie Goulding every happiness. But after all these years I still don’t know who or what I’m rooting for. I don't know if she’s happy or content or miserable. I don’t know if she’s creatively fulfilled or if this is just about the fun and the money and the endorphines of a live show. Those are all valid motivations. Find your joy! Ellie Goulding could make 23 more albums or retire tomorrow, and I have no idea what difference it would make to me or anyone else— including Ellie Goulding — if she did.