Cher Lloyd made the decision to ditch the sassy, picture-perfect pop star image to get raw, emotional and real on her latest single, “Sirens.”
The ballad shows off the pint-size British star’s vocal range, which she says is one of the reasons she decided to make the track the second single off her just-released sophomore album, Sorry I’m Late.
“This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and something that I’ve been doing behind closed doors — the sort of ballad, mid-tempo type of song,” Cher said during “Live From MTV.” “And I feel that it’s been forever since I actually had a song that was real singing that I could strip back and sing acoustically, so “Sirens” for me, was perfect because it was sort of like a new beginning.”
But it wasn’t just testing something new in her song. Lloyd carried that over to her video for the single as well. The singer stripped away her bubble-gum pop persona and in its place we see an emotional, gritty Cher.
And in case you were wondering, those are real tears in the video, because Cher based the story around the time her father was arrested when she was just 5 years old.
“I really felt like I’ve done a lot of pop videos, you know I’ve done videos in front of a green screen with lots of pretty colors, looking all fantastic — not a hair out of place — on this one I thought, I just want to be me,” Cher explained. “So I wrote the treatment for it, I sat down and had a good think about it and I thought, ‘Why not let people in a little bit and make them understand that I didn’t just wake up one day and become a pop star? I had a life before and you won’t believe sort of the stuff I went through.’ So it’s good to let people understand that life isn’t a bed of roses.”
Cher and her father are extremely close. In fact, her father means so much to her that she penned the song “Goodnight” just for him.
“I definitely get a lump in my throat. I have to sort of mentally prepare to sing it and I definitely can’t talk too much about it,” Cher said of the song. “And he’s miles away and that kills me, I can’t just get on the train. There hasn’t been a day since [that] I haven’t texted my dad and my mum. Every day without fail, mostly to say good night.”
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