Heroine at Work
(1) With her friend Taylor
Swift, February 2016. (2)
Performing “All Apologies”
with Nirvana in 2014. (3)
Performing a David Bowie
tribute at last year’s BRIT
Awards. (4) With Jack
Antonoff in February.July, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 43GETTY IMAGES, 4
to me earlier in the day, over lunch at the
Beachwood Cafe, a sunny spot just under
the holly wood sign populated mainly by
people wearing yoga pants and obsessively
healthy glows. “Now I can look back and
be like, ‘That was fucked. All of it. Fucked.
Insane’,” she says of the early fl ush of fame.
“But everyone’s so crazy when they’re 16. I
think if you tell a 16-year-old that they’re
going to Mars – ‘We’re gonna get on a rock-
et and go, and that’s going to be your life’ –
they’d be like, ‘OK, like, that’s all well and
good, but I’m doing this thing by myself
right now, and that’s what’s important.’ Ev-
er y thing kind of normalised week to week.”Not that everything was normal. By the
time Lorde turned her attention to a new
album, she was, in a sense, stuck on Mars.
She found herself in the classic innova-
tor’s dilemma: She had invented a sound
that changed the pop landscape. Now,
shades of “Lorde” were everywhere – in the
breathiness of her singing, in her mix of pop
sounds and singer-songwriter candour –
which means that to sound like Lorde these
days is to sort of sound like a lot of other
people. Her singularity had been co-opted,
while her horizon had changed. “Her fi rst
album was all about being this kid,” says
Jack Antonoff , who produced Melodrama.
“When your entire life changes, and you’ve
built your career on being honest with your
perspective, how do you continue to [fi nd
ways to relate]? It’s near impossible.”In short, Lorde had to fi gure out how to
create earthly magic in the rarefi ed atmo-
sphere of another planet, while also fi gur-
ing out what she wanted her adult life to be.
Allshecouldthinkoftodo,really,wasto
trytomakeherwaybackhome.I
n late 2014, after
wrapping up a North
American tour, Lorde
headed back to Auck-
land, New Zealand. She
reconnected with old
friends – including the kids in the “Royals”
video – who weren’t too weirded out by her
fame, and started trying to fi nd her footing
on a new musical path. “It kind of takes a
second, I learned,” she says, “to write your
way out of the record you just made.” The
initial concept for the new album involved
a group of aliens getting an introduction to
Earth. “I remember writing about the fi rst
step outside,” she says. “These aliens have
just lived in this hermetically sealed envi-
ronment, and so what does the fi rst step
outside feel like?”
As always, Lorde tried to let herself be
guided by her instincts, the keen percep-
tions that had served her so well. She has
synesthesia – seeing songs not
only as colours but also as tex-
tures – and grew up in a mid-
dle-class way that cultivated
this, with a civil-engineer fa-
ther and poet-laureate moth-
er who taught her through an
“overwhelming sensory expe-
rience of the world”, she says.
“Everything is so vivid to [my
mum]. And it’s all kind of gov-
erned by the senses in quite
a literal way – like, the taste
of diff erent fruits can be art.”
Despite being a child who was
“kind of solitary, dreamy, off in
a place”, she grew up with a deep
reverence for pop, which she
sometimes studied more than
her subjects in school. “I have
always been superallergic to anything that
feels exclusive in art,” she tells me.
In the spring of 2015, Lorde, who had
been working again with Little, decided
to branch out. She’d met Lena Dunham
(“We just started chatting online, as you
do”); and through Lena Dunham, she’d
met Dunham’s boyfriend, Antonoff, the
lead guitarist of fun. and the frontman
of Bleachers, who had produced parts of
Swift’s 1989. “We were at a Grimes show,
and he was like, ‘I’ll go get you a drink’,”
Lorde says, “and sort of disappeared into
another room and came back with a can
of pineapple juice – which is quite a weird
thing to bring someone – handed it to me,
then whipped it back and rubbed the top
of it and said, ‘Rats crawl over them in the
factories.’ ” In that moment, she sensed that1234