42 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com July, 2017
but in the midafternoon in a warehouse
building somewhere off the 101 freeway,
Lordeisstrippingdowntoherskivvies.
Inallfairness,soamI.We’reatShareen
Downtown, a 6,600-square-foot Los
Angeles paradise of secondhand sarto-
rial wonders where there are no dress-
ing rooms and, not coincidentally, there
isalsoastrictrulethatthereareno boys
allowed,asasignonthefrontdoorat-
tests. “Isn’t that great?” asked Lorde ear-
lier. “I found out about it through my old
tour manager’s wife, who did the costumes
onMad Men.Shewaslike,‘Ialwaysgo
toShareen.’AndsoIgotoShareennow
as well.”
Today, amid the dust and glamour,
Lordeisonamissiontofindsomething
funtoweartoCoachella,whereinacouple
of weeks the 20-year-old New Zealander
will give her first concert in close to three
yearsinadvanceofhersecondalbum,
Melodrama(out Ju ne 16t h). “ Oh , my G o d ,
it’s like my dream,” she says, homing in
onadelicate,frothyweddinggownfrom
some bygone era. “Like, at Coachella with
a flower crown of these little freakies?”
she suggests, running her hand over the
dress’stinyfabricflowers.“It’ssosick.But
they don’t put the price tags on them, and
they’re always superexpensive.”
She finds a winner, though, in a navy
print dress that has a semisweet Nineties-
grunge vibe, and in a long, flowy number
inwhatshecallsa“tropicalmelted-ice-
cream” print. “I think this is like what
Stevie Nicks would wear at her pool,” she
pronounces. “I have not met her, but she
wraps my heart in soft fabric. Isn’t she just
beautiful?”Havinggatheredafewtrea-
sures,weheadtoamirrortogivethem
ago.LordeslipsoutofherT-shirt.Then
shelooksatmewrylyandgrins.“This,”
she says, “is my Rolling Stone interview
where I’m just getting naked in front of
my profiler.”
Which is exactly not the type of career
Lorde has heretofore cultivated. Discov-
ered at 12 after a talent-show recording
ended up in the hands of a manager at Uni-
versal, the artist born Ella Yelich-O’Connor
was signed to a development deal that ba-
sically entailed waiting it out until she was
old enough to convincingly
sing songs written for her by
adults. That never happened,
and was never going to. By the
time she was 15 – and paired
up with producer Joel Little,
who’d once fronted the mar-
ginally known pop-punk band
Goodnight Nurse – she was
insisting on writing her own
music, on taking charge.
During a week off from
school, she penned “Royals”,
the track that would go on
to be the smash hit of the EP
she’d soon offer for free on
Soundcloud (while simulta-
neously declining to release
any images that showed what
she looked like). Meanwhile,
she’d intuited enough of what
was about to unfold that she
gave herself a moniker that
was both aristocratically
grand and decidedly feminine
(with that tacked-on “e”) – a
move that would have been
pretentious to the extreme
had it not ended up being
spot-on prescient. “I don’t know, it’s a bit
boring: Ella Yelich-O’Connor,” she says
now. “Can you imagine them shouting it at
a festival?” She shrugs. “It just made sense
to me to elevate it.”
Pure Heroine was released in the spring
of 2013, and sold more than a million cop-ies in five months. David Bowie clutched
her hand and told her that listening to her
music “felt like listening to tomorrow”.
Lady Gaga called it one of “THE albums
of 2013”. It wasn’t just the album’s preco-
cious musicality (its spare electronic beats
overlaid with Lorde’s smoky, syncopated
vocals, creating a sound that was part pop,
part hip-hop, part jazz and entirely hypnot-
ic); it was also the teenage authority with
which Lorde’s lyrics took on and then casu-
ally dispensed with decades of pop-music
tropes and stereotypes (“Everybody’s like,
Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your time-
piece.... We don’t care”). The album was so
self-possessed, so in control, so knowing,
that, fairly or not, Lorde was hailed far and
wide as pop’s antidote to its own artifice.
She was not stage-managed. She dressed
like a witch run amok in Goodwill. She
wielded influence far beyond her years. She
was, in other words, “the real deal” – the
counterargument to the prefab, formula-
driven model many listeners assumed was
almost de rigueur for young women break-
ing into the profession. At one point in our
conversation, she refers to the 2014 Gram-
mys, during which she took home both
Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Perfor-
mance for “Royals”, as “my Grammys”, then
catches herself: “I mean it was my Grammy
week, not that I owned the Grammys.” But
in a way, she kind of did.
Since then, Lorde’s life has taken a pre-
dictable turn toward the surreal. She has
filled in for Kurt Cobain when Nirvana
were inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame, curated the
soundtrack for a Hunger Games
instalment, inspired a long-run-
ning South Park parody, and
taken Diplo fishing (“I love fish-
ing! I feel like that’s what you
have to do when people are in
New Zealand”). All the while,
she’s managed to give an im-
pression of authenticity so con-
vincing that people wondered if
it was in fact fake, if she was se-
cretly cast by the music industry
itself to play its own antiheroine.
“Her look, even the fact that she’s
from New Zealand and an out-
sider not just to American pop
but also to how important and
ubiquitous celebrity is, all that
felt relatable,” says Tavi Gevin-
son, editor-in-chief of Rookie magazine
and one of the many young celebrities – in-
cluding Taylor Swift – Lorde has befriend-
ed since joining their ranks.
Then, having won over an entire indus-
try, Lorde disappeared. Or rather, she re-
treated, wanting to know if it was possible
to reclaim some version of the suburban
girl who had unwittingly created a master-
piece, so that she could try to create another
one. At least that’s how she’d described itIt’s not
exactly how
Ithought the
day would go,
I look
back like,
‘That was
insane’,”
Lorde
says of her
first flush
of fame.
“But
everyone
is crazy
at 16.
LORDE
Alex Morris wrote about Evan Rachel
Wood in RS 783.