July, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 45that much of the show was still coming to-
gether (“How do I not get electrocuted?”
she’d asked of one stage stunt, to which a
producer had replied, “And where does the
water go without electrocuting everybody
else?”). Now she all but holds her head in
her hands. “I just got a prescription for
some beta blockers. I was like, ‘Let’s do this.
Give it to me, give it to me.’ ”
Her anticipation of how the album itself
will be received seems less fraught, though
whether that’s some sort of Zen mastery or
simply a calm akin to the eye of the storm
remains unclear. Lorde realises the magic
of Pure Heroine may be impossible to re-
create. “We reinvented the wheel by acci-
dent,” she tells me. “It’s sort of a miracle,
really.” She’s now had four years to come to
terms with the fact that her first album may
have been a fluke, that not every popular-
ity contest is so easily won. “That’s not the
thing I was put on this Earth to do – to push
things forward every time,” she says. “Obvi-
ously I would want people to like the music,
but in terms of being like Drake, how he’s
always pushing the culture forward musi-
cally? I know what my strengths are, and
I think that would have given me a hernia
or something.”
That’s not to say Melodrama retreads old
ground. It puts forward a new version of its
maker. Lorde’s 16-year-old self may have
been deemed pop’s antiheroine – the queen
of the misfit teens – but she never really was
that goth girl, and she certainly isn’t now:“It’s like, ‘Oh, shit, I can’t be kind of sexy if I
want to for a second? Everything I do has to
be, like, ‘library girl’?” She no longer listens
to Pure Heroine. “That felt like a kid,” she’d
said on the way back from Shareen, wig-
gling her fingers in the breeze outside the
open car window. “This feels like a young
woman. I can hear the difference.”
While making Melodrama, she found
herself cranking up Graceland, Don Hen-
ley and Phil Collins – music that might be
considered uncool but, to her, had a time-
less quality. And also a deep, timeworn wis-
dom. Part of music’s appeal, she believes,
is that it’s constantly reaching for an unat-
tainable ideal; and while there’s a good deal
of angst in that, there’s also ample forgive-
ness. “I don’t think you can sing about love
or about breakups in such a sort of full way
at 20,” Lorde says. “To pose a question” –
and now she’s quoting Henley – “ ‘What are
these voices outside love’s open door that
make us throw off our contentment and
beg for something more?’ It’s the most in-
credible fucking question of the universe. I
don’t think I can do that. Even when I try
really hard to not see things in very simple
ways, those confines do still exist because
I’m just so new to living. I’m excited to getolder and get better and be able to do it like
they can do it.”
Lorde recently participated in the birth
of her best friend’s child, which, she says,
“blew my mind. It’s literally life-changing.”
She knows she wants to have kids. She
wants to finally get her driver’s license. She
wants to go back to school one day (“I think
that moment’s going to come,” she says,
“where I’m like, ‘OK, let’s listen to someone
else talk about what it means to be a human
being’ ”). For now, though, she’s on board to
ride this all out and see what comes of it.
“I don’t know if I’m a pop star for a reason,
but I do think that I should be here, I think
that I should be doing this,” she tells me,
her stare unwavering, just before we part.
In two weeks’ time, and despite her
nerves, her Coachella show will come off
as a success. No one will get electrocut-
ed, and she’ll be hailed in some corners
as the festival’s brightest star. Then, just
before the album is released, Lorde will
have a few weeks of just being Ella. She’ll
return to New Zealand to be surrounded
by family and friends who knew her in her
talent-show days. Maybe she’ll walk along
the beach. Maybe she’ll float in some pool,
slip into water like a womb and drift there
with her eyes closed and the gentle sounds
blooming behind her eyes. Time will go
both fast and slow, as it always does. Then
the album will hit. Then she’ll get on the
rocket ship headed for Mars. Then Lorde
CHRISTOPHER POLK/GETTY IMAGES FOR COACHELLA will return.
LORDE OF THE DESERT
At Coachella in April, her first
concert in three years