It can be tempting, upon spending any extended amount of time
around the
musician Lorde, to wonder what is wrong with her.
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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 self-assured or
immune to criticism. It’s not that she doesn’t suffer from second-guessing,
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
small-town 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, before 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 follow-up. Her second album,
“Melodrama,” in 2017, paled in comparison commercially, but it realigned
out-of-whack expectations, establishing the singer as a phenom-turned-auteur, earning
her rave reviews and another Grammy nomination, this time for album of the
year. Then she hoarded four more years for herself.
Along the way, Lorde became an industry blueprint for a sort of
world-building, precocious wallflower singer-songwriter, helping to usher in a
generation including Halsey, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. But Lorde hasn’t
really stuck around to see it.
“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.”
Most of the past four years, though, Lorde lived as Ella among
the greenery and waterfront splendor 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.”
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 savior,” 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 humor, 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. “I’ve got hundreds of
gowns, I’ve got paintings in frames,” she sings on “The Man With the Axe.” “And
a throat that fills with panic every festival day/dutifully falling apart for
the princess of Norway.”
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.
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.”
But she’s found an ally in experimentation and
Billboard-agnosticism in the producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff, with whom
she also wrote and produced “Melodrama.”
“You make your first album with an amazing amount of joy because
nothing exists,” Antonoff said. But he recalled the looming pressure that
preceded the second Lorde LP, which resulted in the pair tucking themselves away
to avoid the glare and resulted in the intimacy of “Melodrama.”
“Solar Power,” he said, came from a renewed sense of freedom.
“The third album is a great place to do it — to wake up and be like, ‘I really
love this work and I’m so lucky to be here.’ You just sort of reconnect with
it. There was a lot of that.”
Lorde agreed. “I felt like I could just chill out and flex a
little bit,” she said.
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