‘It’s a very funny position to be in’
Once a teen phenom, Lorde isn’t chasing hits. The New Zealand musician is just living her life
It can be tempting, upon spending any extended amount of time around the musician Lorde, to wonder what is wrong with her.
That is, where exactly does she hide the bad parts, the off-notes, the unflattering bits of any personality that poke out awkwardly, especially after experiencing a trajectory as strange as hers? No one, famous and feted at 16, could possibly be so well-adjusted. Right?
It’s not even that the singer and songwriter born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, now 24, presents as especially perfect, or selfassured or immune to criticism. It’s not that she doesn’t suffer from secondguessing, insecurities, bouts of vanity, impatience or mindless cellphone scrolling.
But Lorde — the human and the artist — can usually be found one step ahead, intuitively and emotionally, having thought through her reality from most angles: how something felt to her, how she might express that, how it will be received and how she might process how she was interpreted. This is a skill set that many people who become known like she did — as a gifted smalltown teenager with an out-of-the-gate smash success — can feign pretty well. But few do it as convincingly.
“I know enough to know that people in my position are symbols and archetypes and where we meet people, in the context of culture and current events, is sort of outside of our control, so I try not to fret too much,” Lorde said recently, with characteristic consideration and Zen, ahead of the release of her third album.
“It’s a very funny position to be in,” she acknowledged. “It’s absurd.”
But it’s this sense of perspective and self-awareness that has kept Lorde going in an often unforgiving industry. In fact, she made an entire album about finding balance.
“Solar Power,” out Aug. 20, is what happens when a pop star outwits the system, swerves around its strange demands, stops trying to make hits and decides to whisper to her most devoted followers how she did it. For Lorde, the trick was having a life — a real life — far away from all of this. And also throwing her phone into the ocean. (A therapist didn’t hurt either.)
After the reign of “Royals,” her first single — which spent nine weeks at No. 1 and won two Grammys — and her three-times platinum 2013 debut “Pure Heroine,” Lorde took four years to release a followup. Her second album, “Melodrama,” in 2017, paled in comparison commercially, but it realigned out-of-whack expectations, establishing the singer as a phenomturned-auteur, earning her rave reviews and another Grammy nomination, this time for album of the year. Then she hoarded four more years for herself.
“The question I’ve gotten a lot recently is, ‘What have you been doing?’” she added. “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.”
Even now, with the obligations piling up ahead of “Solar Power,” Lorde scheduled a weeklong beach vacation with friends, and used a scheduled interview as an occasion to multi-task, walking to buy a tote bag full of nice cheese for the trip.
Most of that time, Lorde lived as Ella among the greenery and waterfront splendour where she was raised, in and around Auckland, New Zealand, working to figure out her boundaries.
A friend from home, Francesca Hopkins, said, “That whole Lorde thing doesn’t and hasn’t really come up. I’ve probably said the word ‘Lorde’ maybe like — I can count it on one hand.”
The singer also began the process of addressing her internet addiction, inspired by books like Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” and Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
“I would see my screen-time go to like, 11 hours and I knew it was just looking at the Daily Mail,” Lorde said. “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.”
It ultimately took more than that: Lorde’s phone, set to greyscale, 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 — while she waited to see “if anything else worth writing about happened.” But it turned out that it already had, especially when woven in with her current existence.
On “The Path,” the shimmering opening track of “Solar Power” that she wrote early on as a sort of thesis statement for the album, Lorde describes herself as “raised in the tall grass,” but also a “teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash.” “If you’re looking for a saviour,” she warns, “well that’s not me.” But she offers a heady alternative: the sun.
“I’m aware of the way people look at me,” Lorde said. “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.’”
She continued: “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!”
What keeps “Solar Power” from feeling didactic or oversimplified are lyrics in which she satirizes her own experiences, grounding it in gossipy bits of detail and cutting lofty takes with humour, like when she interrupts a fragile treatise on aging with the line, “Maybe I’m … just stoned at the nail salon.”
The artist who once sang dismissively and from a distance about celebrity culture now notes her “trunkful of Simone and Céline” and time spent in hotels, at the Met Gala, the Grammys and on jets. But opting out, Lorde makes clear, just feels better. “Goodbye to all the bottles, all the models, bye to the kids in the lines for the new Supreme,” she adds on “California,” coming full circle back to her “Pure Heroine” ethos.
Lorde knew she needed a proudly outof-touch sound to match her subject matter and sense of disconnect. She found the “twinkly” esthetic for “Solar Power” by combining ’60s and ’70s influences like the Mamas and the Papas and Bee Gees with often-maligned artists from her youth that represented what she called “turn-of-the-century beachside optimism”: All Saints, S Club 7, Natalie Imbruglia, Nelly Furtado.
Once faithful to electronics and allergic to guitars, Lorde employs only a single 808 drum machine on the entirety of the album, in a section meant as a self-referential throwback. “There’s definitely not a smash,” she declared of her commercial prospects with a cackle. “It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a smash, because I don’t even know really what the smashes are now.”
She vowed to never again reach for the heights of “Royals.” “What a lost cause,” she said. “Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”
For the release of “Solar Power,” she tried returning to the idea that she was “very, very reconciled and at ease with things like public perception. It’s just not rocking my boat these days.”
“I would almost value people not understanding it at first,” she said of the album. “It sort of depresses me when an album comes out and I click through it really fast and I look at the Genius and read all the lyrics in three minutes and I realize I know exactly what it is and it isn’t going to grow.”
“I think I’m still giving something that’s really digestible,” Lorde added with a smirk, “but it’s my pleasure to confound. I’m down to be that for people.”
“I would see my
screen-time go to like, 11 hours … 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.” LORDE
ON ADDRESSING HER INTERNET ADDICTION