Lorde and Charli XCX both found clarity after working things out on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix. But before she hopped on the fan-favorite Brat track, the New Zealand singer-songwriter says she felt quite misconstrued by her friend.

Chatting for Charli’s new Billboard cover story, Lorde opened up about her perspective on the cathartic experience of recording the remix. The English alt-pop star had originally sent her counterpart the track as a simple heads-up that it was about the strain she felt in their friendship, a move the “Solar Power” musician said inspired “both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of, ‘Man, I’ve been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right.’”

In response, Lorde almost immediately suggested teaming up for a joint remix. “I don’t know if you like me/ Sometimes I think you might hate me/ Sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli sings on the track before her duet partner chimes in with, “You’d always say, ‘Let’s go out’/ But then I’d cancel last minute/ I was so lost in my head/ And scared to be in your pictures.”

“When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time,” Lorde told Billboard. “There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying. I love that we truly did work it out on the remix. There’s something very brat about that, something very meta and modern.”

“Only Charli could make that happen,” she continued. “She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said.”

The cover story comes a little more than a month after the “Von Dutch” singer dropped her critically acclaimed album Brat, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — her highest peak on the chart to date — as well as inspired a wave of new internet trends. Many fans see it as a long-overdue commercial triumph for the tastemaker — as does Lorde, who stressed, “Charli’s been doing this.”

“Michelangelo apparently once said, ‘I’m just going to carve away all that is not David,’” the “Green Light” artist added to Billboard. “And I feel that that’s what we are getting to witness in real time: Charli saying to herself, ‘I’m going to carve away all that is not Charli.’”