Figure 8

Album: M3LL155X (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • Originally debuted by Twigs during a January 2015 show in Melbourne, this song received its radio debut during an appearance by the songstress on the August 3, 2015 episode of Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show. Twigs revealed to the DJ that the evocative tune was written during a period of confusion that followed the success of her LP1 album in 2014, and that it was partially inspired by voguing. "I was feeling a bit sad and quite a bit lost," she said, "and I went to New York and I started to vogue."

    "Every hand movement that you do in voguing is a figure of 8, and that is eternity," Twigs added. "Every single move has to flow into the other like the eternal move that never stops moving."
  • The song is a track from Twigs' M3LL155X EP (pronounced 'Melissa'), which is also the name of the songstress' personal female energy. "The EP is called M3LL155X, and 'Melissa' to me is my personal female energy. I've never called it 'Melissa' before the EP. It's not a weird alter ego. It's just my way of separating it from myself," she explained to Complex. Twigs added that it was this energy that made her want to appear pregnant in the "Glass & Patron" music video and the clips that follow.

    Twigs went on to explain honing in on her "Melissa," with the help of voguing and her vogue friends. "Voguing has helped me grow into the best young lady that I can be at this time," she said. "Through these boys" - the dancers - "I've learned to embrace parts of my femininity that I wasn't in touch with before."
  • Why Melissa? Twigs explained to MTV News: "Over the last year, I've really kind of grown into myself in terms of being a young woman and I've been thinking about just what it's like to be a girl or what it's like to have a female energy - whether it's in a boy or a girl, there's a female energy - how it can grow, how it can be attacked or how it can survive certain things. So I decided to call the EP Melissa because it's a girl's name."

    "It's a way of me objectifying that female energy so I could separate it into a place where I could write about it fairly and honestly rather than [from] too much of an emotional, subjective place," she added.
  • "Vogueing" is a dance where elaborate hand gestures are used and the dancers frequently stop to pose. Originally popular in the gay community, Madonna brought the dance style to the mainstream in 1990 with her hit single "Vogue."

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