DARLING DIVA, EDGE
Allen puts past behind her on ‘No Shame’ album, tour
The last time Lily Allen came through Boston, she was miserable. That might have been hard to pick up on considering Allen seemed to be in the middle of a magnificent comeback with “Sheezus,” an album that skewered the regicide the music industry forces female pop singers to engage in. (Sample lyric: “Second best will never cut it for the divas/Give me that crown (expletive) I wanna be Sheezus.”) But as her new memoir, “My Thoughts Exactly,” reveals, the British singer spent much of the tour binging on booze and drugs and cheating on her husband. Not surprisingly, she’s nervous about her first tour since that trek in 2014. “I’m really anxious,” Allen said from her home in London. “It’s all slightly triggering for me because the last time I went on this tour, I lost my mind and arguably my marriage and my house and everything else. But I have never felt more connected with the material than I do now, so a lot of this anxiety is positive anxiety. I can’t believe I get to get up on stage for 30 nights over six weeks and sing songs I really, really love.” The material that will make up the bulk of Allen’s setlist on tour, including her sold-out stop Wednesday at the Paradise, comes from her new LP, “No Shame.” Allen’s fourth album mirrors the confessional nature of her memoir while pairing intense lyrics with electropop beats and dips into dancehall and reggae. “I knew that whatever ‘Sheezus’ was, it didn’t please me or it didn’t please the people around me, and I felt like I needed to re-evaluate,” Allen said. “I wondered if this was even the right job for me, but I thought, ‘No, you love this, you’re good at writing songs, but you got caught up in some other (expletive) so maybe try getting rid of the other (expletive).’ ” For Allen, the record documents the discovery of her own sound. While making it, she didn’t consult with anyone at her label, Parlophone, or bring in an army of song doctors to finish half-baked tracks. “The album was my responsibility,” she said. “I put it together.” After a set of tracks that chronicle a dying marriage, frayed friendships, addiction and depression, the album closes with “Cake.” A midtempo song that mixes frustration with rays of hope — she sings, “Eventually you’ll get a piece of that patriarchy pie … Have your cake and eat it” — it provides a much-needed catharsis. “So much of this record is about wanting to be famous and be on the magazine covers and do whatever the (expletive) I want, then realizing I don’t have any control over that, that’s decided by somebody else,” Allen said. “The only thing that I have control over is my creative output. That’s a little bit about what ‘Cake’ is about. You either let this lack of control consume you or you get on with your life.”