Category: Lorde

All year, I’ve been halfway expecting Adele or Rihanna to appear on some major magazine cover and suddenly announce that their new album is done and ready to drop. That hasn’t happened… so far. Instead, we’ve got Lorde on the October cover of Vogue. She’s promoting her new album Solar Power, which she announced at the beginning of the summer in a conventional album-announcement kind of way. Lorde is not reinventing the wheel, she is just an offbeat part of the wheel and that’s all fine with her. I like that she’s found a way to be authentic to her outsider roots while still embracing parts of celebrity, and giving herself the space to grow, change and mature from the 16 year old goth youth who seemed uncomfortable with the trappings. You can read the full Vogue piece here. Some highlights:

She’s not built for pop star life: “I’m great at my job, but I’m not sure I’m the man for the job. I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m not built for pop star life. To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I’m not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar.”

Her Melodrama pattern: “California was a Cadillac Escalade. All these beautiful young people drinking all this tequila. Then I’d come home to Auckland for two weeks and have a massive blowout party at my house, and have some romantic entanglement happening that was very compelling and confusing, and then sort of leave in a cloud of smoke and go and write about that, then repeat the process.”

She left social media in 2018: “I could sense that it would be very bad for the work and for me if I stayed online. I don’t think I’ve met too many people for whom social media is a net positive. It’s producing crazy chemicals, forming crazy neural pathways that are not rooted in positivity. You don’t want to be the person shaking their finger, and I’m totally aware that it’s an immense privilege, a social privilege and kind of an economic privilege to be able to abstain. But I think we’ve got to be upfront about the things that are making us sick as a society.”

She’s really off-off social media: “I’m not, like, lurking on a Finsta. I’m really off. I think I was known for having my finger on the pulse, so it was actually a huge decision philosophically for me to step back from that. But I started to see the phone as a portal. I can’t keep going through that portal, in the same way that I wouldn’t just take mushrooms all these moments of a day. It’s too deep a tunnel.”

Her alleged long-term relationship with Justin Warren: “I love when all famous people can say is, ‘I’m very happy.’  You can write that she’s very happy. Healthy boundaries.”

On fashion: “I can register fashion as both beautiful and absurd. I do remember that visceral moment”—at the Met gala in 2015—“of thinking, A pharaoh is lying right there, and we’re in couture. But I kind of love it. There’s tons to be gotten from all of it.”

She’s more comfortable putting her body out there: “When I said I felt young for the first time—it meant feeling like I’m confident enough to put my butt out there. I wouldn’t have been able to do that as a teenager. When you’re really famous as a young person, feelings get magnified. At that time, people were discussing my body on Twitter, and the natural response was to shrink away from it. Now I have a sense of my worth and my power, and my body is—awesome, for one thing.”

[From Vogue]

I enjoy how casually she takes all of this. I mean, she’s a big deal, the prototype for the current era of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, the teenage-girl-with-feelings. But Lorde is also the prototype for outgrowing that image and giving herself the space to develop into something else. I’ve seen the reviews complaining about Solar Power, that it’s not as good as Pure Heroine or Melodrama, but I think all of this is a great sign for her career: she’s clearly doing what she wants, she’s in control of herself, her image and her sound, she writes what she wants and she’s fine if you don’t like it too. She’s not trying to act cool – she is cool because she’s indifferent to the daily pop-music wranglings and drama.

Cover & IGs courtesy of Vogue.

Lorde’s new album, Solar Power, comes out on August 20th. I can’t even publish the album cover because Lorde really did get her ass out. But the message is there, apparently: get your ass out. Put down your phone. Stop fussing over everything. Enjoy yourself. In case anyone needed to have that underlined, Lorde chatted with the NY Times about the album, what she was doing in the four years in between Melodrama and Solar Power, and how it’s sexist to talk about how Jack Antonoff has a stable of female singer-songwriters he produces and he’s the one responsible for their success. You can read the full Times piece here. Some highlights:

Where she’s been for four years: “I went back to living my life,” she said of her recent hiatus, identifying as “a hothouse flower, a delicate person and a massive introvert,” drained after a year-plus of promotion and touring for “Melodrama.” “It’s hard for people to understand that. The question I’ve gotten a lot recently is, ‘What have you been doing?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no — this is a break from my life.’ I come back and perform these duties because I believe in the album.”

She was addicted to the internet: “I would see my screen-time go to like, 11 hours and I knew it was just looking at the Daily Mail. I remember sitting up in bed and realizing I could get to the end of my life and have done this every day. And it’s up to me to choose, right now. So I just sort of chose.”

She changed her phone settings & learned to live: Lorde’s phone, set to grayscale, now has no internet browser; she is locked out of her social-media apps, with others handling the passwords; and a coder friend even made YouTube inaccessible on her laptop. Instead, she cooked, baked, walked the dog, swam, gardened — chilled, in other words.

She’s not anyone’s savior: “I’m aware of the way people look at me. I can feel the huge amount of love and devotion that people have for me — and for people in my position — and straightaway, I wanted to be like, ‘I’m not the one that’s worthy of your devotion. I’m essentially like you.’ My kids — my community — they’re expecting spiritual transcendence from me, from these works. ‘I need Lorde to come back and tell me how to feel, tell me how to process this period in my life!’ I was like, oh, man, I don’t know if I can help you with that. But what I do know is that if we all look up here, it’s going to help you a lot!”

For the album, she only used a single 808 drum machine: “There’s definitely not a smash. It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a smash, because I don’t even know really what the smashes are now.”

She’ll never make another “Royals.” “What a lost cause. Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”

The third album: “I felt like I could just chill out and flex a little bit.”

Working with Jack Antonoff yet again: “I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record. I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me on production and arrangement. Jack would agree with this. To give him that amount of credit is frankly insulting.” She called the narrative — which has also included speculation about the pair’s romantic and sexual life — “retro” and “sexist.” “I know that there are certain hallmarks of what Jack does and some of those things I really love and some of them I don’t like. And I beat them out of the work that we do together. I say this with so much love and affection, but I feel like we’re doing up a house together and he’s like, ‘Look at this serviette that I fashioned into the shape of two swans! Look at this set of woven baskets!’ And I’m like, ‘Great — one per room.’”

On her personal & professional relationship with Jack: “No one who’s in a job that isn’t my job has a relationship like the one I have with Jack. He’s like a partner to me. We’re in a relationship. It’s not a romantic relationship, but we’ve been in it for seven years, and it’s a really unique thing, so I don’t begrudge people maybe not being able to understand it.”

[From The NY Times]

Am I alone in still listening to Pure Heroine though? She really did capture lightning in a bottle with her first album. Melodrama wasn’t bad at all – she has some real bops in there, and I think she grew as a pop songwriter. I’m curious about her personal and lyrical evolution for the third album – what was precocious as a 16-year-old might seem patronizing as a 24 year old. That being said, I like that her message is go offline, get a life, make friends, go for a walk, etc. It would be very easy for her – as it’s easy for many artists – to keep her fans agitated, aggrieved and engaged with her drama.

As for the Jack Antonoff stuff… there is that same-y quality to the records he produces though. That’s why Lana started to sound a bit Taylor-ish and why Taylor definitely started sounding Lana-ish and why Lorde leaned into a frothier sound on Melodrama and on and on. I’m not saying Jack is responsible for the careers of these women, but he is responsible for making them sound alike!

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.