FLETCHER is no stranger to heartbreak.
Nor is she a stranger to the messy emotions that flood your heart when it’s broken. “Break-ups are so hard,” she tells me. “We’re relational human beings and we feel so much. Obviously our journey with self-love is important, but so is our relationships with other people.”
It’s this yearning for human connection that I’ve always found in FLETCHER’s work. “You know I dream about/Getting back together in the future” she pines on ‘If I Hated You’, from her first album THE S(EX) TAPES. That yearning hasn’t faded in her newest album In Search of the Antidote. In fact, it’s stronger.
She opens the album’s second single ‘Lead Me On’ with “I was born to love you/You were born wild and free/I was made to find you/But your heart is constantly running, just never towards me”. FLETCHER’s now trying to make sense of all the heartbreak and mess she’s been sitting in for the past few years. “I learned so much through love. Love has always been my biggest muse,” she says. “It’s a double-edged sword. It’s the thing that brings us the absolute most joy and also the most gut-wrenching pain.” In Search of the Antidote is an exploration of how FLETCHER navigates these feelings, where she finally allows herself to wade through the tides of sadness, grief, and sometimes anger.
We’ve all experienced heartbreak. But how we choose to heal from it is deeply personal and transformative. Time, FLETCHER found, was the only way to mend her broken heart, whether she liked it or not. “I don’t ever want anyone to tell me that but it’s the truth,” she says. “Time is really the only thing that does heal [but] nobody ever wants to hear that when they’re in the depths of [heartbreak].”
While time as a healer might be the last thing that FLETCHER wants to accept, she’s found ways to stay present in her pain and trust that she’ll be okay. “Everything is perfect in the moment the way that it is,” she says. “Whatever is meant to be is going to be whether that’s you finding your way back to someone or finding your way back to you. You can trust in the universe to handle it.” It’s a big step forward in clarity for FLETCHER, who was still unsure of her journey in the song ‘I Think I’m Growing?’ (from her second album Girl Of My Dreams), admitting, “I don’t know where/Where I’m going/But I think I’m growing”.
In Search of the Antidote doesn’t have just one meaning. Sure, FLETCHER’s searching for the antidote for her heartbreak and sadness, but for the past year she’s also desperately searched for the physical antidote to her Lyme disease. “The big inspiration behind [the album] was disappearing for a year or so. I really had to. I was quite sick,” FLETCHER says. “The antidote has always been something. It’s been women, it’s been the road, it’s been vans and stages, relationships, and music. Over the past year, the antidote was something totally different. It was healing. It was trying to find answers as to what was going on with my body.”
Towards the end of last year, FLETCHER announced her diagnosis in a now-deleted Instagram post. “I started becoming increasingly ill over the last couple years and just kept pushing even though I knew there was something deeper going on,” she said in the post. Although little is known about the full extent of Lyme disease, it’s believed to be a tick-borne bacterial infection that can cause a host of health problems, including joint pain, fatigue, severe headaches, inflammation of the brain or heart, and sometimes paralysis. On Instagram, FLETCHER said it has taken “a tremendous toll on my physical body, it has also caused concern for my voice”. The diagnosis caused her to cancel her recent Australian tour, before rescheduling to July this year (which was set to include an appearance at the now-cancelled Splendour In The Grass).
Looking for the silver lining may be the last thing that anybody wants to do when your world starts to crumble around you. But FLETCHER’s battle with Lyme disease and its impact on her singing actually pushed her to find a deep belief in herself and the universe. To find wellness both physically and emotionally.
That wellness journey has led her here, to In Search of the Antidote. “It was like a search for the literal antidote and I wanted to create an album that was an embodiment of all of those things,” she says. “Love and all of its infinite manifestations.” The album’s final song, aptly titled ‘Antidote’ is what FLETCHER calls a “peaceful, cinematic antidote”. In it, she declares that her lover is, in fact, the antidote, “You’re the medication I wanna take/You are my antidote”.
The Lyme disease diagnosis, and the search for its antidote, essentially forced her to halt her career after the massive, rather controversial, hit ‘Becky’s So Hot’. Back then, in 2022, FLETCHER found herself at the centre of one of the biggest dramas to hit lesbian TikTok. Not only was the song about FLETCHER’s public breakup with photographer and YouTuber Shannon Beveridge, but it name drops Shannon’s then-girlfriend, Becky Missal. The song quickly became a trending TikTok sound, with people debating whether Shannon knew about the song or was involved. After FLETCHER and Shannon had first broken up, FLETCHER hired Shannon to film music videos for THE S(EX) TAPES, which was about their relationship. So perhaps she was in on this too? However, Shannon addressed the drama in a TikTok, saying “this is not PR that I’m a part of … no one asked permission”. Of course, that added more fuel to the fire and people questioned whether it was the right thing for FLETCHER to do.
‘Doing Better’, off In Search Of The Antidote, is FLETCHER’s way to reflect on that chaos. “At the time there was an excitement around it,” she says. “As time went on and I was able to process it more, I realised that it really didn’t feel very good for me.” Things reached a boiling point at the same time that FLETCHER got sick. “It forced me to get super quiet on things like social media and tours being pulled down, and analytics and numbers and followers,” she says. “All the really dark stuff in my own mind got really loud. I was just sitting with all of this.”
Taking a step back allowed FLETCHER to become aware of what the whole situation said about our culture at large and where she wants to fit into it. “[‘Doing Better’] is a larger commentary on our society [and how it goes] ‘look at me, look at me, look at all these things I’m doing. I bought a new car, I’m travelling the world, I went to a bunch of psychics, I worked on my health and healing, I went on the pussy diet’, but I feel like shit on the inside,” she says.
On the outside, it might have seemed like FLETCHER was on the cusp of it all. Viral songs, sold out shows, and was about to embark on a global tour. But these things weren’t connecting with her. “Society just prioritises all this external ‘success’,” she says. “I’m performing on stage with Miley [Cyrus] and all these things which were beautiful highlights. But I was having a different story going on internally.” Even if she didn’t feel her best, FLETCHER had someone in her corner during the whole thing: Miley Cyrus herself. “She’s the most perfect human on the planet,” she says. “She’s a magic human. She’s so kind, so attentive, she cares deeply about the person in front of her, and that you feel her presence. She lifted me up in so many ways and getting to perform with her was such a dream. It really was.”
Turns out Miley Cyrus wasn’t the only one in FLETCHER’s corner. G Flip, who opened for FLETCHER during her US tour in 2022, also became someone she could lean on. “G is like having an orb of sunshine in your pocket, all the time,” she says. “They’re just such a special human. Obviously, so talented, plays every fucking instrument under the sun. G’s so special to be around and they deserve all of the success and love and abundance that this universe has to offer because they’re just one of the good ones.”
You’d be forgiven if this all means that FLETCHER regrets how everything went down. In ‘Doing Better’ she sings, “Your girlfriend never thanked me for making her go viral/Fuck it, I’m her idol”. This is why her guest appearance on Shannon’s podcast Exes and O’s was massive news for lesbians across TikTok. With how publicly messy everything was and Shannon’s response to ‘Becky’s So Hot’, why on earth would FLETCHER want to be on a podcast with her? Well, don’t forget about that healing journey she’s been on. “There’s just been so much that’s happened over the last couple of years,” she says. “It just felt like a really beautiful opportunity for us to just clear the air. We hadn’t really had any communication since our break-up, aside from running into each other at The Eras Tour. So to be able to turn a new page was deeply healing.”
More than anything, FLETCHER’s just happy to be friends with Shannon again. “I adore Shannon and she’s one of the best humans on the planet,” she says. “I wrote the lyric ‘I’ve been practising this moment but I never thought I’d see you again’. I think to be able to have so much go down and have such a radical conversation and really go there and take accountability and apologise just goes to show that relationships can be repaired. So for us to be friends now feels so nice.”
FLETCHER’s rescheduled Girl Of My Dreams tour will pass through Australia during July also.
Ky is a proud Kamilaroi and Dharug person and writer at Junkee. Follow them on Instagram or on X.
Image: Supplied / Sebastian Faena
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