The story of Madison Beer’s rise to fame is already well-known by now. And, in a nutshell, it goes: Justin Bieber tweeted, among other links to her videos, Beer’s cover of Etta James’ “At Last” circa 2012, resulting in both worldwide attention and an expected backlash from his jealous female fans. It didn’t take long for Bieber to help get her signed to the same label as him, Island Records, as well as sign a contract to be managed by his own Svengali, Scooter Braun.
By 2013, Beer was assuring the media of her work on a debut album that would include “slow songs, sad songs, happy songs, songs about boys and songs about being who you are. I’m making sure I’m happy with all of the songs, because if I am not happy with them, I can’t expect anyone else to be, you know?” In the end, that album was scrapped, but it seems Beer took the same philosophy into the future with her sophomore record, Silence Between Songs. An album she decided to revamp entirely after already turning it in a year ago. The name of the record, however, stayed the same. And it’s a fitting moniker considering how much silence there has been between her various releases. Granted, Beer has more or less offered up a consistent flow of singles since 2013, starting with “Melodies.” It was only during the three years she spent recording her EP, As She Pleases, that the singles dissipated (with “Something Sweet” being her last release of 2015 before disappearing into recording mode).
Returning to the music charts with the release of “Dead” in 2017, it felt pointed that Beer should only reenter the spotlight upon turning eighteen. While other pop stars like Britney Spears and, later, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, would have no difficulty commodifying their girlhood, it was almost as though Beer wanted to wait until she was “legal” to belt out ditties that consisted of lyrics such as, “For now I am not, not gonna sleep with you/Stop now (yeah)/Stop now (yeah)/Have some respect/Don’t act like I’m blind/I can see your intent/Spent way too much time I have/Listening to this, listening to shit/From a player, you get no love.” Sure, Brit might have alluded to such sentiments in her earlier work (namely, with lyrics like, “I’m not that innocent”), but she had already turned eighteen when the Baby One More Time record was released. And yes, even Rodrigo, whose lyrics were always more “boy-oriented” than Eilish’s, waited until turning nineteen during the recording of Guts to sing things like, “And I told my friends I was asleep/But I never said where or in whose sheets” and “I just tripped and fell into his bed.”
Del Rey, who influenced (a.k.a. “raised”) all three Gen Z musicians, wouldn’t have to worry about such forms of “tact,” as she was twenty-six when her debut came out. Practically “ancient” by current Gen Z standards (hence, the TikTok trend that used “Young and Beautiful” against her). Maybe that’s why it was so easy for her to sing such “cocaine carols” as, “He loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart” and “Light of my life, fire of my loins/Be a good baby, do what I want” (that last line alluding to, of course, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita). For Beer, such sentiments came much sooner in life, as was revealed by most of the tracks from As She Pleases, including “Tyler Durden” and “Home With You.” As for Beer’s film reference on the former track, it’s apparent that, as is the case with Del Rey, her vocals tend to lend themselves to the cinematic. Indeed, that’s why Beer was adamant about the videos “matching up” to the high-level emotionalism of the singles she’s released thus far. So it was that she stated of the “companion” videos, “Home to Another One” and “Spinnin,” “I wanted people to be able to put headphones in and close their eyes and they could see everything. When I listen to those songs, I can see movies—the colors and aesthetics and the videos perfectly capture the essence of my lyrics, the instrumentals—it all comes together then.” Spoken like a true synesthete (à la Eilish and Lorde).
Or perhaps someone who simply has Del Rey’s knack for aesthetic…the word that’s been buzzing for millennials ever since the Tumblr heyday. And now grafted from them by Gen Zers like Beer…who also happens to have the same Del Reyian love of 60s-era music. This, needless to say, extends to The Beatles and Beach Boys (with Pet Sounds in particular being an album that Beer and her producer, Leroy Clampitt, were “obsessively” listening to at the outset of recording).
In fact, Beer admitted that “Spinnin’” was influenced by The Beatles’ “Yesterday” to none other than Del Rey herself, who chimed in, “I heard a lot of Beatles influence throughout the whole thing, amongst about six other influences [also calling out Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World”]. I’m so on that 60s, 50s tip. I thought it was the perfect record.” As many girls Beer’s age and beyond feel that Born to Die is the perfect record. Funnily enough, Beer (fourteen years younger than LDR) would become famous the same year Del Rey “officially” did, with the release of said debut in 2012. Beer would one-up that title with the simple directness of the aforementioned “Dead.” And no, she’s not afraid (anymore) to cop to Del Rey being a primary influence on her work. Not after Del Rey herself came up to her at Urth Cafe one day to tell her what a fan she was. From there, a friendship was quickly forged, with Del Rey not only doing an interview with Beer for Interview magazine (whereas Beer’s contemporary, Billie Eilish, would give the interview for Lana’s own Interview cover this year), but also turning to her for guidance and advice whenever needed.
Feeling relieved that Del Rey wasn’t a case in point of the old adage, “Never meet your heroes,” she would also tell her in the same interview, “I want to be able to show other artists, and just females in general, that we have to be there for each other, and we have to love one another. Life is too short for envy.” Beer learned something about that from the moment the army of “Beliebers” turned on her for being, to them, nothing more than some “hot bitch” Justin was paying all of his attention to. It took her a while to realize that “comparison is the thief of joy in every sense.” Adding to that Olivia Rodrigo-on-“jealousy jealousy” sentiment, Beer also noted, “For a long time, I was someone who would compare myself: for example, when Billie first caught fire—it felt as though she had quickly popped off and was already 100,000 times more successful than me. I was jealous or upset by it but now, I couldn’t be more proud of the work that I have out.” Acknowledging that she has just as many insecurities as any “normal” girl, Beer does come across as being more comfortable than ever in her own skin with this album.
Starting with “Spinnin,” the fifth single from the album (even though it was freshly released on September 15th), Beer sets the stage for a world of her own. And yes, as she said, a large part of creating that world is the visual that goes with it. Set in a suburban neighborhood where time has seemingly stopped (but, then again, how can you really tell in suburbia?), there’s a Twilight Zone-meets-Groundhog Day vibe to her sense of overpowering depression in the wake of losing a relationship.
With an album cover pulled from the video for “Spinnin,” Madison Beer establishes a fraught, escapist tone immediately with this image of her whooshing through a cornfield. Stealing away to secure some of that “silence between songs” she refers to with her reasoning for titling the album as such, specifically stating, “I got started really young doing this, and I feel like I’ve had a very busy twelve years or so in the industry and I kind of convinced myself that the moments where I was making music and when I was on tour and when I was my busiest was when I was growing… As I’ve gotten a little bit older, I realized it’s actually been the moments that I’ve been able to tune out the noise and I’ve been able to be alone, really reflect and be more isolated where I’ve grown the most. So, it’s the silence between songs and when the noise is turned off is when I feel like I’ve learned who I am the most.”
The slow, malaise-oriented tempo of “Spinnin” gives way to the more rhythmic “Sweet Relief.” Something that Beer describes not being able to get in the chorus as she laments, “I’m seein’ you everywhere I go/I don’t dream of anyone else/All I need, sweet relief/It’s just somethin’ only we know/Something only we know.” The last line harkening back to the way Keane sang “Somewhere Only We Know.” Her earnest obsession with the person she’s so focused on that she even starts seeing him in her dreams affects her health, to boot, as she also adds, “Can’t eat, can’t sleep/No, you’re not makin’ this easy on me.” But such are the drawbacks of having a crush (as Alicia Silverstone could tell you). Perhaps that’s why Beer turns to more nature-oriented sentiments on “Envy the Leaves.”
For those who feel the song sounds only too familiar, that’s because it seems as though Billie Eilish and Finneas peered inside Beer’s mind while coming up with the melody for “What Was I Made For?” Indeed, when Beer sings, “I envy the snow” it sounds just like Billie Eilish saying, “I used to float.” And yes, in her lyrical reverence for Mother Nature, Beer ends up creating something of a knockoff of MARINA’s 2019 single, “Handmade Heaven.” A song that, incidentally, also starts with the phrase, “I envy.” Except, in MARINA’s case, she envies the birds, opening the track with, “I envy the birds high up in the trees/They live out their lives so purposefully/I envy the spiders, the squirrels and seeds/They all find their way automatically.” Beer expresses a similar view with her own opening verse that goes, “I envy the leaves/That grow from the trees/They’re all so carefree/Through the seasons, unaware of the fall/If only I’d see/It’s quite easy to be/A drop in the ocean, with no worries and no questions at all.”
Abruptly changing sonic tack at the end, the song’s musical denouement is almost like an explosion of the carefully-controlled emotions she’s been holding for the majority of the song. Devolving into an all-out jam session-y feel, it smacks of Tame Impala, which Beer also cited as an influence on her work.
The music shifts abruptly to something more bossanova-esque on “17.” The age so many women in music like to mention, perhaps even more than “sweet sixteen.” And yes, not only does MARINA have a song called “Seventeen” from back when she was Marina and the Diamonds, but Del Rey also refers to that age in one of her most iconic songs, singing, “Only seventeen/But she walks the streets so mean” in “Carmen.” In “17,” Beer also alludes to that kind of jadedness. Specifically, her own. How she was made to grow up too fast after coming into the spotlight so soon in her life. Thus, Present Madison consoles Past Madison with the lines, “I hope she knows that I would never blame her/‘Cause all she did was all she knew.” And, of course, there are plenty of “Del Rey keywords” (which Olivia Rodrigo also serves up on “lacy” from Guts…namely, “daisies” and “ribbons”), including “cherry” and “summer” in the context of “cherry ripe” and “summer skin.”
Bemoaning on the chorus that, “All my life I’ve never had the chance/To stop and smell the flowers/All this time, I never got to sit/And dream away the hours/No memories, like black and white TV/And everybody says it’ll be okay/Like life is just a game/But I don’t wanna play,” Beer can’t help but ask, “Oh, is it too late now, to slow down?” The rosy answer being that it’s never too late to do anything. And, if nothing else, perhaps the next global pandemic will force everyone to “slow down” again, no matter who they are.
Del Rey’s favorite song on the album (apart from “Spinnin”), “Ryder,” fittingly sounds like a vocal cross between her and Ariana Grande’s stylings. To be sure, it would be wrong to discount Grande’s marked influence over Beer’s vocal stylings (de facto, it would, in a roundabout way, be wrong to discount Mariah Carey’s). Like Grande, Beer also has a brother…except hers is younger. His name, of course, is Ryder, and that’s who the song honors as Beer makes an apology for the effect her fame undeniably had on his own childhood. So it is that she sings, “Our youth down the drain/And I’ll take all of the blame/For all of the countless/Times that you cried.” Del Rey’s affection for the song, she admitted, has to do with her commitment to sibling relationships, telling Beer in their Interview magazine exchange, “When I was younger I remember thinking, ‘If my siblings can’t come with me, I’m not going anywhere. I have to do whatever it takes to make sure that they thrive.’ It’s a beautiful sentiment.” One that Beer conveys to this striped-down melody that understands how forgiveness between siblings can so often be tacit (unless we’re talking about Blanche and Jane Hudson). Nonetheless, Beer wants to declare, “All that’s unspoken/All the years that werе stolen/You were still in that housе/I shouldn’t have left you behind/And I fall to pieces [Del Rey also uses this Patsy Cline lyric in “Cherry”]/Sometimes all that you need is/A shoulder to cry/And I’m lucky that you’re mine.”
“Ryder” then easily transitions into the ethereal “Nothing Matters But You.” Delivered like a siren song lulling a sailor into her underwater lair, Beer croons, “You belong to me tonight/Hold me while I cry/Swimmin’ underneath moonlight/Taken by the tide.” At the same time, it’s a track that speaks to how she herself is surrendering to the powerful magnetic force of some bloke, announcing in the pre-chorus, “If you never stop me/Then I’ll just keep fallin’.” She also gets self-referential in the chorus itself by alluding to “Spinnin” (“Make a girl think the world’s only spinnin’ for you/Nothing matters but you”).
The jaunty, uptempo “I Wonder” (which, at times, reminds one of the notes to Kylie Minogue’s “2 Hearts”) marks Beer’s retreat from the sadness that weighed her down in “Spinnin.” Placing it as the midpoint of the album, therefore, marks a palpable shift in tone as the listener continues on their journey to the end of the record. Beer remarked of “I Wonder,” “Spinnin was always first but we didn’t know what for sure was going to be the last. And this was my intention… for this to be the response to ‘Spinnin.’ [The lyrics to ‘Spinnin’] are ‘Did the world stop spinning? Nothing seems to change.’ This one’s like ‘I woke up happy, I wonder why.’” Or, as Angela Chase (Claire Danes) once said of Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) in My So-Called Life, “It was like Jordan Catalano had been surgically removed from my heart. And I was free!” The same way Beer feels free from the burden of anxiety-inducing and/or unrequited love. Which is why “now each breath of air is sweeter/Birds are singin’, grass is greener/Suddenly, the world is bright again/I used to live to die by/Somebody else’s side/But now a new day breaks and I feel fine/I wonder why?” Perhaps because, after a certain amount of time, the human ability for total denial of all previously felt emotions as a means of self-preservation kicks in. It’s a kind of “self-cleaning” (a.k.a. self-lobotomy), if you will.
Even so, Beer is back to addressing some cad of a figure (likely her own father, the root of all issues with men) in “At Your Worst,” lamenting, “I hope I never hate myself/The way I know you hate yourself/It hurts to see you hurt/The ones who love you at your worst/I’m sorry you don’t trust yourself/Enough to trust somebody else.” As the one who “wants to help,” Beer has clearly reached her breaking point in terms of wanting to keep trying. By the same token, she knows that this person who she’s been attempting to “lead to water” like a horse against its will has only infected her with the same issues (further leading the listener to believe it’s about her dad). Hence, she concludes the song by changing the pronouns in the lyrics to, “And sometimes I still hate myself/The way you made me hate myself/It hurts to know I hurt/The ones who love me at my worst/I’m sorry I don’t trust myself/Enough to trust somebody else.” This emotional expression also leads perfectly into “Showed Me (How I Fell in Love with You),” the third single from the record.
Wanting to exude the same closed-off nature as the man she was referring to in “At Your Worst,” “Showed Me (How I Fell in Love with You)” finds Beer asserting, “How I wanna be like you/Oh, oh-oh, it’s true I’m gonna be like you.” The accompanying video accordingly shows Beer clocking the conning behavior of a crooked billionaire who runs a high-stakes underground poker game. And in it, Beer is also sure to include a pool scene of herself that channels Del Rey in “Blue Jeans” and “Shades of Cool.” Sampling The Turtles’ 1969 hit “You Showed Me,” Beer again parades her Del Reyian flair/love for all things 60s in the sound and visual. As she also does with the following track (and fourth single), “Home to Another One.”
Serving alien Mad Men realness throughout the video she co-directed with Aerin Moreno, the song doubles as being about “the other woman” and as being about mourning the end of a relationship and realizing one’s ex has moved on to someone new. Either way, Beer is sure to take advantage of 60s-inspired sartorial visuals in getting across the aura of the song in its music video format.
The dreamy, otherworldly tone persists on “Dangerous” (a title that, of course, reminds one of Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman”). A self-reflective track that has the same dramatic, Piscean pizzazz as anything out of the Olivia Rodrigo songbook, Beer stated of its writing, “I’m currently in my third long-term relationship and I’ve done a lot of self-reflection over the last two years—a whole lot of therapy… and just learning about myself. Part of that, for me, has been to reflect. There have been times where I was like, ‘Is it me?’ When you’re, like, the common denominator in something, am I the trauma? It’s one of those things where I had a moment of self-reflection. Being the dramatic Pisces I am, I definitely had times thinking, ‘Maybe I’m unlovable?’ and I think we all go through phases of that.” Incestuously enough, both Beer and Rodrigo have dated Zack Bia, the supposed inspiration for Beer’s “Selfish” and Rodrigo’s “Vampire.” “Dangerous” is equally self-pitying (the Pisces way) as “Vampire,” with Beer belting out the chorus, “Tell me the truth/What did I do?/Look at me/Why can’t I see?/No, it can’t be this easy/To let me go/But if you say so/Guess I make love too dangerous.”
As she apparently did for the boy she refers to in “Reckless,” which served as the first single from Silence Between Songs back in 2021. This, too, being extremely “Rodrigo-esque” in subject matter. More specifically, it has the same tone and thematic focus as Rodrigo’s “traitor,” with Beer rehashing, “Each day goes by and each night, I cry/Somebody saw you with her last night/You gave me your word, ‘Don’t worry ’bout her’/You might love her now, but you loved me first/Said you’d never hurt me, but here we are/Oh, you swore on every star/How could you be so reckless with my heart?” Rodrigo similarly accuses, “You betrayed me/And I know that you’ll never feel sorry/For the way I hurt, yeah/You talked to her when we were together/Loved you at your worst [a Beer song title no less], but that didn’t matter/It took you two weeks to go off and date her/Guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor.” As for the “Reckless” video, co-directed by Beer and Amber Park, it borrows more from the Taylor Swiftian love of all things “storybook”-oriented.
Beer then once more switches easily from her “wounded side” to her “saucy side” on the eponymous “Silence Between Songs.” But just because the upbeat rhythm gives her the vocal license to sound more confident and vindictive than saddened and betrayed doesn’t mean that the song isn’t still fundamentally about feeling bereft. Ergo Beer’s announcement, “I can’t be alone with my thoughts/When the music’s off/No, I can’t turn them down/Tune them out/Don’t know how/Oh, I never knew/That the silence between songs/Could ever be so lonely and so long.” And yet, as Beer said, it is the silence between songs (a.k.a. the album releases that place her squarely in the spotlight) that she’s come to cherish the most.
Once more giving Del Rey a run for her money—this time on the topic of daddy issues—“King of Everything” concludes the album. While some speculate it could be about Beer’s patriarch, Robert Beer (hey, look at that, Del Rey’s dad is also named Robert), many feel the likelier inspiration is Scooter Braun, who Beer had little choice in capitulating to after Justin Bieber was the one to make her go viral (cue the sound of Ye shouting, “I made that bitch famous”). Making his manager her manager, Beer eventually cut ties with Braun before releasing her debut album, Life Support, in 2021. Bieber, on the other hand, is still technically under contract with Braun despite the rumors of their business breakup.
Based on the lyrics of “King of Everything” (which is perhaps far more incisive than Taylor Swift’s “Karma,” also purported to be about Braun), it seems like Beer barely got out in the nick of time. At the two-minute, forty-seven-second mark, the song offers a decidedly 80s guitar riff for added melodramatic cachet. Seemingly repurposing Beyoncé’s “Sandcastles” lyrics, Beer mockingly sings, “Baby, you’re the king of everything/Buildin’ castles in the sand/That crumble in your hands/Baby, you’re the king of everything/And right now you’re thе man/But no one gives a damn/When thе rain comes pourin’ down/To wash away your crown/You’re the king of nothin’ now.” Meanwhile, with Silence Between Songs, Beer is starting to become more and more of a queen of everything in the music industry. Even if her competitors, whether contemporaries like Rodrigo or “mentors” like Del Rey, are mostly saying the same things she is.
Jordan Edwards/Popdust