44 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com July, 2017
she “had come home in the nicest possible
way, to meet someone like that”.
When Antonoff and Lorde got together,
the album was still a fairly nebulous col-
lection of impressions and ideas. “I was
like, ‘Let’s just gather around a piano and
see how you’re feeling’,” Antonoff says,
“ ‘and see what has happened to you since
your last album that’s really worth shar-
ing.’ ” One of the first songs they wrote
together was “Liability”, about how toxic
her fame can be to those who would want
to get close to her. “That was very impor-
tant,” says Antonoff. “It opened up a big
space, which was ‘OK, there’s a way that
you can talk about all of these things that
have changed, and it’s not going to put you
on an island.’... Everyone feels like a liabil-
ity to their friends and family sometimes.”
From then on, Lorde relied on her ex-
periences, as they current-
ly were. “Everything writ-
ten about on the album, give
or take a couple of lines, all
took place in New Zealand, is
about me and my friends,” she
explains. A few months after
beginning to work with An-
tonoff, she moved out of her
parents’ house, buying one
not far away that looks, in the
cellphone photos she proudly
shows me, like the sort of
retro midcentury space where
a Lorde video might be shot.
She hung a “big, weird, very
beautiful, quite saucy” paint-
ing by Celia Hempton in her
bedroom (“It’s definitely a va-
gina”) and hand-painted de
Gournay jungle wallpaper in
her living room (“It’s like a bi-
zarre dream”). She described
her perfect day as: “It’s sum-
mer and everyone’s off work,
and we drive to the beach and
then everyone comes back to
my backyard, and we’ll all be
sitting around on the grass and listening
to something and someone’s made whis-
key sours and the day turns into evening, it
just sort of evolves, and all of a sudden it’s
two in the morning and everyone’s danc-
ing. That’s a nice day for me.”
When she’d stocked up on enough of
those days, she would head back to An-
tonoff and the studio to try to decipher
them. “I would go [to New Zealand] and
do everything that I end up writing about,
and then I’d fly 10,000 miles and write
about it,” she says. “I felt having the dis-
tance was really important for me. I re-
ally needed the freedom to be like, ‘This
is what I’m gonna say about this person.’ ”
The process worked, slowly. “It was a
hard album to make,” Antonoff admits. “If
you change a breath on a vocal take, she’ll
notice, and she’ll like it or she’ll hate it. It’s
a meticulous process with her, and this
particular album was an intense journey.
I think that’s what it had to be.”
There were dark nights of the soul, mo-
ments when she felt like Pure Heroine
might be the only album she’d get. “There
was a real hit of, like, ‘I just don’t have an-
other one’,” Lorde tells me. “ ‘It could never
be good enough.’ ” One “freakout” was bad
enough that Antonoff sent her home. “Ev-
eryone was like, ‘Get out of here’,” she says.
“They barrelled me out of the studio, and
f licked me across the globe.” She took a
month off to gather her thoughts.
Then, around 2015, she broke up with her
longtime boyfriend, photographer James
Lowe. Though she’s circumspect about the
particulars, she admits she was surprised
by the depth of emotion she’s experienced
of late. “Five years ago, I thought that was
as vivid as it got,” she says from the back
of a black Escalade that was hired to take
us to and from Shareen. “And then to have
this ‘oh, my God’ – it’s like that times 100. I
think I’ve had a real emotional renaissance
in the last 18 months of just
being like, ‘Wow, it hurts’, and
letting myself feel all of those
things, which has been kind of
transcendent.”
By the autumn of 2016, the
album had started to coalesce
in her mind as not a break-
up album, exactly, but as one
about the moments that come
next, the party where you have
the freedom to cry alone in
the bathroom or to explore
the contours of someone new.
One day she woke up and the
album had suddenly revealed
itself. “It was just ‘melodrama’,
that’s what it was. It’s like this
spooky universe picks the day
and gives it to you, and you can’t imagine it
being anything else.”
Where Pure Heroine is coolly detached
and self-contained, Melodrama is more
searching, and, in some ways, more cel-
ebratory. It’s also, musically speaking,
more expansive. “[On Pure Heroine], Ella
had these electronic sensibilities,” says
Antonoff. “But there are guitars on this
album, there are all these analog-based in-
struments. It’s not about minimalism any-
more; it’s this bigger, broader thing. It’s a
very different album in terms of the palette
of sounds. I think that started by the fact
that we wrote the album sitting around
a piano. That style is very new for her.”
And Lorde was now painfully open to new
things. The first single, “Green Light”, she
explains, is “me shouting at the universe,
wanting to let go, wanting to go forward, to
get the green light from life”. Did she think
she got it? “Oh, my God,” she says. “Yes.”
With these mysteries solved, Lorde
spent a lot of the rest of 2016 in New York,working out of a studio in the Brooklyn
house Antonoff shares with Dunham, who
lent emotional, if not material, sustenance.
“Lena’s not really an award-winning cook,”
Lorde says, laughing. “There were a lot of
Postmates. But she would come in and be
like, ‘You’re incredible, you’re the greatest
people, I love you, goodbye.’ ” Outside the
studio, Lorde often kept to herself. She
stayed in a “bizarre businessman hotel –
just me and conferences”, she says. “In a
lot of ways I felt like a little monk, drifting
down into the subway, being very solitary
and just thinking about the music all the
time and not really socialising very much.
Every once in a while, a sweet little NYU
student would come up to me and say some
lovely thing, but really I felt like I was able
to lose touch with myself as a person of
note, which is a really valuable thing. By
the end, this part of my life, this part that
we’re doing right now, all of this felt very
abstract.”
Today, however, has been relaxed com-
pared to what’s transpired and what’s to
come. Jet-lagged from a week of press in
Europe, she’d gotten up early and gone for
a swim. Now she’s shopping not for stage
attire, but for what she’ll wear at Coachella
when she’s out fangirling in the crowd (“I’m
excited to see the xx, to see Radiohead. Oh,
Kendrick will be amazing!”). She tries,
with some difficulty, to slither into a lacy
peach dress – the sole way in which she
actually seems her age is that she hasn’t
quite gotten used to her own grace. “OK,
so I can already tell that this has deeply got
some issues,” she says, swivelling around in
front of the mirror to reveal holes located
suspiciously in the boob area.
She tries to extricate herself and ends up
with her arms stuck above her head, laugh-
ing from inside the layers of dress. “Oh,
dear,” she says. “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
I rush to her aid, though there’s no doubt
that,aswitheverything,Lordewouldhave
gotten it under control.A
couple of days l ater, i
meet Lorde in the outdoor
dining area of the icon-
ic L.A. hotel where she is
staying despite its repu-
tation as the sort of place
someone like her might stay. She is there,
she assures me, for the impressively deep
pool. She wanted to do some “dives and
shit”, and to immerse herself fully in that
silky, muffling blue. “It’s a womb thing,” she
says. “Oh, it’s so cosy.”
This is a particularly appealing sensa-
tion in the present moment. “I’m fuck-
ing nervous,” she says, wearing the navy
grunge dress she’d bought at Shareen. “I
haven’t performed in three years, and so
it’s like forced extroversion for a true in-
trovert.” In a rehearsal for the Coachella
set a few nights before, it had been clearIt’s like,
I can’t be
sexy if I
want to
for a
second?
Every thing
I do has
to be like,
‘library
girl’?
LORDE