Power

Album: Brightest Blue (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is about how love in the 21st century is dictated by social media, superficiality and material things.

    Everything in your world just feels like plastic
    Wearing your crown, it's pulling me down
    You just want the power
    You're not really down for love


    Said Goulding: "Dating can sometimes start out with lies or embellishments. The girl in the song is disillusioned by love and the cruel, good looking, self-obsessed people she keeps ending up with."
  • Goulding wrote the song with Jonny Coffer and Jamie Scott. Coffer and Scott also produced the track and played bass, guitar and keyboards.

    Lucy Taylor, Digital Farm Animals and Jack Tarrant are credited as the track samples Dua Lipa's 2015 track "Be The One."

    David Paich receives a credit as the song sounds similar to Toto's "Georgy Porgy."
  • Goulding filmed the song's music video in lockdown at her home in London. Imogen Snell and Riccardo Castano of ISSTUDIO (Madonna's "Medellín," The XX's "On Hold") directed the clip over FaceTime.

    Goulding filmed herself in lingerie, "stuff I wouldn't dream of ever wearing in bed, because that s--t is uncomfortable," she told The Guardian. "It was incredibly liberating. It wasn't like I'd suddenly bloomed and become this sexual thing, I'd always been that. But there's a difference between being it because you felt that you had to be, and then being it because you truly feel it and you can embrace it."
  • Goulding recalled to Apple Music how "Power" ended up accidentally sampling Toto's "Georgy Porgy."

    "We wrote the verses on piano and then I wrote with Jamie Scott. So Jamie wrote a bunch of the early One Direction stuff and then he worked with Niall (Horan) and Harry (Styles) and so he's done a lot of pop stuff. He is a beautiful pianist, a beautiful writer, has an incredible voice. And he sat down and wrote and we have this piano thing, but you know what? Then somebody was like, 'Wait, that sounds a bit like a Toto song.' But I mean, I didn't know this and then we look it up and yes, it sounds like a song that was written by the guy from Toto."

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