‘Royals’ blood O
Grammy winner Lorde’s little sister has her own way with words — and a dream to go with them
N Wednesday, India “Indy” Yelich will be at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center with thousands of others watching a performance by her sister Ella — known to the rest of us as Lorde.
Yelich suspects it will be one of the few times she’ll see her sister this year. “We’ll probably just get some take-away and catch up,” Yelich tells The Post. “She has a really tight schedule, [and will] probably prefer I stay in with her.”
You’d think that spending your adolescence watching your sister become a world-famous pop princess might make you insecure, but 19-year-old Yelich says no: She swears she won’t let her sister’s fame make her feel invisible.
“It’s a part of my life, and I’m not going to avoid it,” the New Zealander says. “But it only takes up a small section of my book.”
That book is “Sticky Notes,” a poetry collection that came out in February, parts of which she’s shared with her over 30,000 Instagram followers. Its title comes from that humble office supply, and flipping through the pages of her personal copy reveals a rainbow of jottings on Post-it notes.
She says her and her sister’s love of writing comes from their poet mother, Sonja Yelich, to whom the book is dedicated.
“She instilled words within me when I was 5,” she says of her mother. “She definitely made me love writing, and so did Ella.”
Indy and her three siblings grew up in a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. After Lorde, now 21, broke through with 2013’s “Royals,” Yelich enjoyed some of the spoils — even borrowing her sister’s Dolce & Gabbana skirt for a 2015 photo shoot.
Meanwhile, Indy tried to find her own way, beginning with some television commercial work in New Zealand. In spring 2017, she left her parents, elder sisters and younger brother behind to try her luck in Los Angeles and study acting with Hollywood coach Marjorie Ballentine. She’d been to the city before, once to attend the 2014 Grammy Awards, where she watched her sister snag two honors.
She lasted six months in LA before moving to the East Village, inspired, in part, by Patti Smith’s memoir, “Just Kids.”
“I needed honesty, and New York is for the honest,” the self-assured brunette says. “LA’s a beautiful place, but sometimes you feel like that sunshine is mocking you a bit.”
Her book is a snapshot of early adulthood, from failed first loves to unbridled self-discovery. In her poem “A Bridge Into the City,” she writes: “try be like jack gilbert or frank o’hara/with a touch of rupi kaur for relatability/but make it specific to you/this is what they tell me.”
Not surprisingly, she can also sing. She uploaded a cover of a Great Big World’s “Say Something” to the music-sharing platform SoundCloud that’s received just over 950,000 plays and landed her a brief write-up in Teen Vogue. And, yes, she hopes to pursue music more seriously.
“Poetry’s not that different from lyrics,” she notes, and it’s not unusual to hear her softly singing whatever song is stuck in her head at the moment.
For now, she’s scraping by, like any other young New Yorker. A self-taught cook and self-proclaimed stir-fry specialist, she’s known to whip up meals for family friends in the city. She’s also taking creativewriting workshops, hanging with friends and dating “just casually.”
“I was on Bumble, and I was like...” she says, cutting herself off. “No, I’d rather have an organic thing.”
Mostly, she’s enjoying the bohemian life that she’d read about while growing up on the other side of the world. She believes Washington Square Park, where she often sits and writes, is the “heart” of New York City.
“James Taylor sat and wrote poems there, wrote songs there,” she says. “I always think of who was here before me.”