Lorde performs at All Points East Festival in London in 2018. Photo / Burak Cingi/Redferns
Feted by David Bowie and Kanye West, she ruled the world aged 16. Eight years on Lorde reveals how she navigated fame at such a young age.
When Lorde was a teenager, David Bowie declared she was "the future of music". Kanye West admired her so much, they ended up working together.
It must be nice to be so wanted, but when you're suddenly world-famous at 16 the pressure can break you — as it did Britney Spears, Justin Bieber and so many other teenagers thrust into the pop machine.
And that was just some of the acclaim for Lorde. The numbers were even better, with her debut album, Pure Heroine, and its hit single, Royals — No 1 everywhere, with 22 million sales — paving the way for a generation of dark, spare pop. Lorde even took the place of Kurt Cobain in an official Nirvana tribute concert. And after Bowie died, she sang Life on Mars at the Brit awards with the Thin White Duke's band. What was it with her taking the place of our musical icons? Bowie's son, Duncan, called her performance "beautiful".
Lorde — whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor — grew up in Devonport, Auckland, the second of four siblings, daughter to a civil engineer father and a poet mother whose parents had emigrated from Croatia. Lorde is still based in New Zealand, eight years after becoming a household name. In 2017 there was a brilliant, if lesser-performing second album, Melodrama, and this week, finally, she is back — with her third album, Solar Power.
Now she is 24, it seems a good moment to ask how she survived the spotlight of teenage celebrity. One moment she was at Takapuna Grammar School, the next on the cover of Rolling Stone.
"It's funny," she says, of her early years of express-lane fame, when everyone wanted a piece of her. "I'm still only really understanding this now. For the first songs you've written to have that impact, gives you a really skewed perception of how it all works. Everyone wanted to meet me. And know how my brain works."
She seems incredulous. We are speaking over Zoom. Wearing a yellow polo shirt, she is funny, engaging, animated, punctuating her conversation with broad smiles. Lorde is like the best friend in a romcom, the one everybody actually watches the film for. The word that springs to mind? Happy.
"It's not normal," she continues, looking back to her mid-teens. "My first single was so huge — I thought, 'This just happens.' I remember, over and over, the sensation of feeling like people wanted to drink my youth." She puts her hands together, before miming ripping something apart. She is a very expressive interviewee. "Some elixir! People were like, 'Give it to me!' I felt, 'God, this is about you'. I was aware of what my youth was doing to people, but I just wanted to be really good [at music]."
There are two theories about fame when people have it very young. Some say you become trapped in the age you become famous. Others that, if you have to start your adult life at 16, you are forced to grow up faster than your peers. Lorde writes about this in Solar Power. The lush ballad, Stoned at the Nail Salon, goes, "All the beautiful girls will fade like the roses"; another line reads, "Growing up a little at a time and all at once".
Lorde, who had fame before she could legally drive, says both theories applied to her. "I know people in the first camp and in the second," she says. "But I have grown so much in the years since I became famous. I feel much, much older. A lot of my school friends describe me as a mum, or grandma. I'm their old lady friend. But the thing about my job is that I get to play. So, in a way, you are immortalised. Friends leave that sandbox, I will always be kind of a child because of what I do."
Teenage pop stars rarely end up in control. What is Lorde's secret? "Fame is a really interesting thing to happen," she says. "But it gets tricky for people if they find the experience super-validating, if they feel it's giving them fuel. For me, I was always a little suspicious of it, or sure it would go away. I am significantly less famous than I was when I was 16, but that's exactly how I like it. I'm not getting my validation from it."
Which, in a way, is fortunate. Melodrama, the follow-up to Pure Heroine, was a comparative flop commercially. Headlines made tough reading for a 19-year-old. The opening night of Melodrama's US tour was played to just 6000 at an 18,000-capacity venue. Anyone who knows the album — and its single, Green Light, one of the best songs of the decade — knows they are not the ones missing out, but it must have hurt Lorde. The acclaim, pressure and then apparent disappointment — all before she hit 20.
"When Melodrama came out, I had this moment of being, 'Ah, I'm not always going to be No 1 for nine weeks,'" she says. "Now I've settled into this place where people call you, then one day they won't. And that's all good. I'm a different part of the meal. I know who I am."
Lorde is a changed person now. "I listened to Melodrama recently and was, like, 'Oh, girl! You were stressed out. This was a really fraught time for you!' And it was. I remember touring and being gripped by angst every night. It was quite tough, to be honest, to live like that for a year."
Solar Power seems remarkably anxiety-free, a calm breeze rather than a hurricane. The once "future of music" has dug into the past to find her perfect present (at one point she mentions I Dream of Jeannie, the 1960s show that was first broadcast 31 years before Lorde was born). The album is a sunny acoustic beauty of 1970s California sounds, some Primal Scream and even a shimmer of Natalie Imbruglia.
"I'm more settled," Lorde explains. "I also had my first big grief experience halfway through making this album and that was huge for me. I was marked." She is referring to the death of her dog. "But it wasn't anxiety — it's not up here." She raises her hands and shakes her head with quick breaths.
We move on to some quickfire questions. Lorde once said that Pure Heroine was "teen drama" and Melodrama was "ecstasy". So, what, is Solar Power? "The divine," she says. She knows it sounds pretentious.
Explain? "I was not raised in a religion, but when I went outside I could see God in this way that was really big for me." A Christian God? "Definitely not — just something higher. I think when you're me and have been the architect of your universe for close to a decade and the lives of people around me have changed because of me — it's easy to think you are central to things. I pay a lot of people's salaries. That's a crazy position to be in so young, so having power redistributed a little bit made me feel, 'Oh, I'm a speck!'"
You welcomed the opportunity to make yourself feel smaller? "Absolutely."
Back to her debut smash hit, Royals. That song's line "Let me live that fantasy" was about her and friends not being royal. But if celebrity is the new royalty, surely the singer no longer represents the people she once sang for? "Well, it's funny," she says. "I'm never not going to be rich, you know. My life is different now and there's no desire to speak for people I don't belong to. But it wasn't intentional to speak for anyone — I did it back then because I was sick of not being able to recognise myself in pop culture. There were no cool kids! I was sick of it."
The funniest line in Solar Power goes: "Cause all the music you loved at 16, you'll grow out of" — is it a direct message to fans? "Absolutely," she says. "I'm saying, 'It's okay if this doesn't mean as much to you. That might be sad, but it's all good. We're all moving on.'" If only more pop stars had this level of self-realisation.
"My fans probably feel a duty to me," she adds. "But if you're looking for a saviour, that's not me. It's somewhere. It's someone. It doesn't have to be me."
Solar Power is out now
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