Lorde: ‘I think I was always going to be a weird artist’

Lorde was thinking the other day about the strange fact that she is a pop star. ‘I wonder if part of it is because pop happened to be the medium that I was interested in the most when I was 15, you know?’

It’s not that she is bad at being a pop star. Only a couple of nights ago, she was performing songs from her third album, Solar Power, at the Guggenheim International Gala in New York, wearing her own hair as a scarf, peeling a tangerine live on stage — as it should be. And it’s not that she hasn’t enjoyed the past decade or so: the paradigm-shifting, 10 million-selling hit she scored with Royals in 2013; David Bowie calling her ‘the future of music’; the fierce fandom she has inspired; the space she has created for any number of single-minded, young female artists that gives her the status, at 25, of an elder stateswoman.

It’s just that everything she now does is defined by her much-younger self. ‘I think there are other versions of my life where I am a novelist or a journalist or… a critic, do you know what I mean? But it happened to be the medium that I was interested in as a teenager that took me somewhere.’

This is a surprising admission for someone who always seems so self-possessed, so singular, so unafraid to tell a record company that its bosses didn’t know what they were talking about. And she, Ella Yelich-O’Connor, the intensely shy girl from Auckland who spent her time posting on Tumblr and recording harmonies into her phone, did. I first interviewed her for ES Magazine back in 2014 and came away impressed by her extreme self-possession. ‘You could be forgiven for thinking that she has planned her career in the same exacting aesthetic terms as she does her art,’ I wrote. But no, she never felt like she was shaping her own destiny. ‘You know, it sort of fell to me,’ she says. ‘I have zero will.’ She stops and laughs. ‘Well I must have some because…’ She makes a gesture as if to say: I wouldn’t be speaking to her if she didn’t.

It is 7pm in Auckland, an hour before sunset, and 6am in the UK, an hour before sunrise. Lorde is speaking over Zoom under house arrest, or rather, hotel arrest, having just flown back home from New York. New Zealand’s strict coronavirus protocols mean that she must remain in managed isolation under the supervision of the Civil Defence force for seven days. The prospect, however, doesn’t seem to faze her too much. ‘This whole pandemic is such a mystery to me,’ she says. ‘I just do what anyone tells me to do.’

It’s also useful decompression time: a week to transition from Lorde to Ella again. ‘I think people don’t realise, it’s almost like I take time out of my life to do the pop part of it. It’s like this thing that I go and do and then I go back to my real life.’ She also has a stack of books to keep her company: On Freedom, by the philosopher Maggie Nelson; The Dolphin Letters, compiling those sent between the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and the poet Robert Lowell; some Annie Ernaux novels; The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. Impressive, I say. ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s a miracle I can read at all,’ she says, in reference to the fact she left school at 16. Actually, she was certified ‘gifted’ at the age of six and won numerous awards at school; she hopes to continue studying properly one day.

Solar Power is Lorde’s third album, following her wildly successful debut Pure Heroine (2013) and the critically lauded Melodrama (2017). It is a departure, in its summery vibe and, ahem, cheeky cover art, but it still contains plenty of songs over which you will wake up haunted and have to play immediately.

Still, while her fans adore it, Solar Power has been the first of her releases that has received anything other than straight-up rave reviews. It was notably absent from the recent Grammy nominations. Being a famously well-adjusted person, fully cognizant of the ephemeral nature of adulation, she’s not overly concerned by that. ‘I sort of knew it would be a bit of a strange record for people,’ she says. ‘But I think it to be wonderful and exactly what I needed to make.’

Besides, she is not out to recreate her early success. ‘I think people have a certain idea of me because of how popular my first album was but I think I was always going to be a weird artist, you know?’ she says. ‘I’m exactly where I thought I’d be.’ What she really wants is to create a ‘rich, deep body of work’ and for each record to change her artistic trajectory ‘in really dramatic ways’. ‘That’s the long way of saying it’s all good, you get nominated for stuff when you get nominated for stuff.’ She notes that Bowie didn’t get a whole load of Grammy nominations either.

Solar Power has been framed as an environmental record, in that the flash of inspiration that brought it all together came during a trip to Antarctica. Lorde also made the eccentric decision to release a CD version of the album that didn’t actually include a plastic CD, apparently for environmental reasons. However, she is understandably wary of charges of hypocrisy. ‘I’m a pop star — I’m not going to be able to halt the end,’ she says. ‘I’m going to tour a massive show around the world next year, that’s a huge footprint. The power that I have is in symbolic choices.’

In truth, however, Solar Power is mostly smaller-scale. It’s an album of clear skies and unforbidden pleasures, hanging out with her old school friends on Waiheke’s beaches after the euphoric highs (and lows) she documented on Melodrama. ‘I remember coming off tour in 2018 and saying to everyone, “I want to get bored. I’d love to be bored!” What a ridiculous thing to say.’ But then she did ‘literally’ sit on her sofa for six months. She read books, looked after her puppy, tended her garden, learnt to cook, remembered to Facetime her brother on his birthday and ‘just sort of learnt to be an adult’. She also hosted parties, endless parties, by the sounds of things. ‘I love to put myself in a situation where I can dance. I can dance for a long time, hours and hours, all night. I’m the last person on the dance floor. So that’s kind of what I did, it was mellow and needed.’

It’s also an album that actively discourages her fans from investing too heavily. ‘If you’re looking for a saviour, well that’s not me,’ she sings on ‘The Path’. (Naturally, this is precisely the sort of self-awareness that her fans treasure.) And it feels significant that it is her first recording to include voices other than her own. She had been listening to a lot of The Mamas & the Papas and Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, and decided to form her own virtual choir, employing Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo as backing singers. ‘I wanted it to feel like me and my friends a little bit more,’ she explains. The Swedish disco queen Robyn, meanwhile, provided a spoken-word ‘outro’ to ‘Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen it All)’, and left Lorde in awe. ‘I mean she’s as good as it gets. “Dancing on My Own” — that song is just the Holy Grail. Every single one of my peers is talking about “Dancing on My Own” all the time.’ She presumably has Jack Antonoff in mind here, her long-time collaborator who has also produced albums for Taylor Swift, Clairo, Lana Del Rey and St Vincent. He once said that ‘Dancing on My Own’ ‘completely changed my life and how I approach writing’.