The idea of revisiting the first COVID quarantine of 2020 might be anathema to most people, but the new Charli XCX documentary Alone Together offers the inside track on the creation of how i’m feeling now, a deeply personal pop album and a key creative document of the pandemic.
Alone Together tracks the six week period when Charli holed up in her LA home and made a whole new album from scratch, with little company besides her boyfriend and a pile of freshly purchased recording equipment.
What the documentary reveals in its incisive sub-70 minutes is both a nuts-and-bolts look at the making of how i’m feeling now, as well as a portrait of an artist for whom creativity and her self-worth are almost inextricable from one another.
In interviews, Charli XCX often talks about her earliest days as a performer when she’d play live at raves in suburban parts of her native England.