Exclusive Interview
Inside Emma Lord’s New Hit ‘For the Record’: Her Celebrity Inspirations, Reliving Her Musical Past & More
The stars of Emma Lord’s latest adult rom-com, For the Record, are leaving it all on the record, both literally and emotionally. Mackenzie, the lead singer of the pop girl group the Thunder Hearts, and Sam, the lead of pop punk boy band Candy Shard, would never have considered themselves friends, not even during the years when their onstage romance stoked fans to mania.
A few years later, both Sam and Mack have left their respective groups and aren’t quite sure whether to get back into the spotlight. Sam has gone under the radar to protect his son’s privacy, and a surgery has left Mack with a voice different from the one fans are used to. And so, to bolster both of their careers, the artists agree to jumpstart their careers with a joint album that will send all of their former fans and new listeners wild. As they question whether all that onstage tension was to cover up the very real offstage romance, neither Sam nor Mack can ignore their long-standing history. Can their musical careers handle it now?
Emma Lord spoke with Swooon about her own career in the music industry and how it influenced this story, knowing just the right moment to turn rivals into lovers, the celebrity inspirations (we’re looking at you, Taylor Swift), and the impact of fandom.
This book is only your second adult romance. How has it been moving into the adult romance space? What’s been the most exciting challenge you’ve faced?
Emma Lord: I would say the difference with moving in the adult space is you have a lot more freedom with your characters. They just inherently have a lot more free will. There aren’t any curfews, there aren’t any parents telling them what to do. There have no guardrails. And that is so fun because all of a sudden there are all these parts of the world that your characters haven’t access to before, but because of that, they have so much more room to make their own mistakes and so many other things that they have to deal with and take responsibility for. It’s always interesting getting into a new headspace. It’s funny, because it’s like, I am an adult, but I have written for so long from the perspective of a teenager that it’s both freeing and a little bit disorienting to suddenly write characters that have problems like yours. You’re like, oh, that’s a little close to the nose.
You yourself had a songwriting career before you became a writer. Is that the reason you wanted to write a musical book?
Lord: I knew I always wanted to write a music book. Music has just been ingrained in our lives from the start. And what’s funny is, when I was a kid, I was so sure that I would have a musical profession. So sure that I graduated early from college, moved to Nashville and did the whole country thing for a little while. I was trying, I guess, for the more singer-songwriter thing. It’s just one of those things where it’s the right dream, if you’re happy every moment of the way doing it, even when it sucks. I was like, I love this, but with singing, it just wasn’t that way. So I left that sphere, but I carried it with me for over a decade since I walked away, and it was really fun to get to go back [through this book]. It was fun to get to visit a “what if” version [of my life]. If I had stayed, if everything had been a little different. It was fun to be so far removed from that [part of my life], and it was more of a joy to get to go back than anything.
For the Record is a celebrity romance. Can you talk about any of the celebrities or bands that inspired it?
Lord: I feel like I went in with no particular inspirations, but as I was writing it, Sabrina Carpenter was just blowing up with [her album] Short n’ Sweet in a completely different way. I do feel like some of her sass was infused in the girl band characters a little bit. I didn’t really have much to go off of for the more punk rock bands. That was an amalgamation of all of the different punk rock bands that we were all so nostalgic about in the 2000s.
This book touches on celebrities, fans, and fandom culture. Were there ever any fandoms that helped shaped you as a person?
Lord: All of the Disney properties had me by the throat. Marvel and Star Wars. I was writing fan fiction for all of those different fandoms because they were so broad. You see a movie or even a series, and it’s like they only have so much time to tap into a character’s backstory, so it was always for me this really fun way to explore with writing and also find a sense of community. Once you find community, it’s something that’s very magnetizing. It pulls you in, over and over again. For me, fandom is that sense of community, and that home outside of your home. It was nice to have that to draw on when I was writing. I’m a huge Swiftie, but I’m not deeply ingrained in any music fandom, or at least not as ingrained as I would like. So it’s fun to get to draw on that experience and put it in the music world.
You’ve written many rivals to lovers stories, including this one. What do you think is at the core of the rivals to lovers trope that makes it so appealing?
Lord: I just love rivals to lovers because there is a forced mutual respect when you cannot take down your rival unless you fully understand and respect their abilities. It’s almost like you have to know them to the degree of someone who loves them in order to take them down. And that’s why it is so fun to see that natural progression from rivals to lovers, because it’s almost inevitable. The minute you choose someone to be your rival, it’s like, how can you not fall in love with them, knowing everything that you have to know in order to be a good rival?
Mackenzie is a certified lover girl but in some ways her reputation has taken a hit for it. You write, “She loved so hard the internet made her a fool for it.” Why did you want to write about the public shaming of women being in relationships? (It’s very Taylor Swift and a little “Please, Please, Please” by Sabrina Carpenter coded.)
Lord: It’s definitely something I wanted to touch on because it’s come up so many times in popular culture, and it’s eaten at me that a woman does the exact same things a man does and gets eaten alive for it. At least romantically, when you’re in a public sphere like that. It’s strange to me that we’ve come to rely on these musicians to put feelings into words for us so we can have catharsis and meaning and can close chapters on our own stories, or if we can’t do that, then at least get some, rage or sadness out of our systems. We’re using them for that, but we’re judging them for what it took for them to do it. It’s like you’re getting catharsis out of this song, because you made mistakes, too, because we’re all human. They’re out on the front lines getting their hearts broken for us.
Alter egos and evolution are important for both Sam and Mackenzie. Both are ready to restart their careers under a new name, and Mackenzie has an anonymous account for music. What made you want to lean into the idea of showcasing the difficulty of putting the past behind you for these characters?
Lord: Your 20s and your early 30s are this murky area where you’re trying to figure out who I am, but I might have steered myself in slightly the wrong direction getting there, and now I don’t know how to go back to baseline. Mackenzie, with her anonymous persona, [is in that] period where she knows something’s not right [with her career path], and has to gather herself. I think Sam and Mack both had these opportunities to hide. To some degree, Sam was discovering he was a father, and that is an integral part of his identity, and something that he loves, but it is also a mechanism for him to hide from the world for a little while. And so they’re trying to re-steer their own ship in the direction that feels right. I think that’s harder than starting over, figuring out how to start again with the pieces that you already have. That was a huge part for both of those characters. Like, this is my life, and I love so many pieces of it. What can I do to make it the life it’s supposed to be?
There is a familiarity that Sam and Mackenzie have because of their shared history. Their banter is a part of the uniform of their dynamic. You particularly describe it between Mackenzie and Sam as a “script.” How do you know what moment is the right one for these characters to break that script? And what was your favorite “script break” of theirs?
Lord: You know it’s right when they themselves are either in a situation where they have to take a risk, or they are finally ready to take a risk, because that script is definitely something that they rely on to make themselves feel safe. They’re like, this is a pattern I understand. To draw on another quote, it’s easier to stay in a familiar hell than an unfamiliar heaven. And I feel like that’s what that script for them is. And then they’re suddenly faced with these challenges that they have the opportunity to run away from and go back to the familiar hell, or realize we have to push past our circumstances and break the script and agree to work together. There’s a scene right at the beginning, where they’re deciding whether or not to work together, and they are at a masquerade ball, and I think that’s the first conversation where they both have to break the script, and they surprise each other. So that was a lot of fun to write, because it wasn’t that much yet, but it was sort of like a fun little hint of what was to come.
Speaking of scenes that were fun to write, what was the swooniest scene of this book?
Lord: There’s a scene at the pool and Sam’s doing that trope where he’s teaching her how to swim. I couldn’t resist and that was a lot of fun. It was this blend of defensive, playfulness, and vulnerability, and just how it morphed into that kind of understanding there’s like a mutual trust there. And I find that to be a very sexy thing.
Since this is a book about music, can you give us a song that represents Thunder Hearts, Candy Shard, and Mack and Sam?
Lord: I would say for Mack and Sam. I was thinking about The Civil Wars a lot. The Daisy Jones & the Six adaptation had just come out, so that came up in my head for a little bit, too. In terms of the Thunder Hearts there’s a band I love called Trousdale. I love them. And, of course, Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter came up with those influences, too. I must say, there were a lot of nostalgic bands. And more modern things I was definitely looking at, like Jake Wesley Rogers has this punk adjacent, creative sound that I liked. There was also the classic Blink-182, Good Charlotte going in there, too!
Hannah and Serena, Mackenzie’s fellow Thunder Hearts, are major parts of this story. Can we expect to see more from the Thunder Hearts in the future?
Lord: I would love to do something in this universe. I like to occasionally make little nods from other books of mine in current books. But I would be curious down the line to do something with them because I do feel like they’ve got a lot of fun stories.
For the Record, Out Now
