One of the best things Ive ever done Lorde on the joys of a social-media blackout

When Lorde was a teenager, there was no one like Lorde. No one in the whole wide world of pop music who looked like her (pale skin, clever face, Medusa hair); no one who captured the yearning and precocity of being 16 years old like her (because she actually was 16); no one who became a global pop star while living in her parents’ house in the Auckland suburbs like her.

There’s still no one like Lorde, now 24, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor. She has amazingly emphatic features: strong nose, wide mouth, thick brows, big eyes spaced widely apart, and enough hair for about five people. It’s the kind of face you might see in a Marvel movie, invariably belonging to a superhero capable of tearing a world apart with her bare hands. But she also seems fragile: slim shoulders, long slender neck, hair parted in the middle and drawn back in a low ponytail, exposing large, elf-like ears. She’s wearing a pinstriped shirt, and halfway through our interview she puts on an endearing, concertina-shaped grass hat. “This is my gardening hat,” she says. “Actually, it’s Australian.”

This interview was supposed to happen in Sydney, but now half the country is in lockdown, and she’s in Los Angeles for the promotion of her third album, Solar Power â€" in the Pacific Palisades, one of the richest residential neighbourhoods in the city, full of mountains and ocean views and immensely privileged, Botoxed coyotes. She’s sitting on a verandah with her screen angled towards a seemingly limitless backyard of trees and hills and rocky outcrops, as if she’s conjured her own wilderness kingdom in the heart of LA.

It’s her mid-afternoon and my pre-dawn, and she looks startled to see me sitting in antipodean Zoom darkness. “What time is it there?” she asks immediately; 5am, I tell her. “My goodness, I am so sorry! I had no idea!” Her New Zealand accent is as endearing as her hat. I’ve spent most of this year interviewing people on screen from the US in the middle of the Australian night, and I could count the number who even noticed my black windows and blazing lights on the fingers of one partially maimed hand.

Perhaps Lorde notices more of what’s happening onscreen than the average person because she’s so rarely on any screen at all these days. In May 2018, when she got back to New Zealand after a huge world tour of her second album, Melodrama, she wiped all her social media accounts. (A month earlier, perhaps coincidentally, she’d made one of those awful, commonplace Instagram gaffes: captioning a photo of a hot bath in her hotel with the words “And iiii will always love you” â€" forgetting that Whitney Houston had died in a bathtub in 2012. She apologised immediately and profusely, but the post made global news from CNN to the BBC.) By early May, she was gone â€" from Instagram, from Twitter and from YouTube.

It’s no small thing to remove yourself from the feed of the (reportedly more than 20 million) followers who constitute your most loyal fans and customers.

“There are artists who work in cycles,” explains Adam Holt, head of Universal Music New Zealand, who signed Lorde when she was 13 (she’s still with the NZ division of the company). “But there’s so much pressure on people to be constantly maintaining their presence, and from a business side it works: you’re keeping the pots boiling all the time, which gives you a lot of opportunities. If you want to stay in the game, it’s the way of the world. All artists do it, and the really successful ones are incredibly good at it.”

All artists except Lorde. “It is a weird thing,” she acknowledges. “It’s a lot to ask of your fans and your community, that they be okay with not seeing your face for years at a time. But for me, all I have is the work that I make and the songs that I write and the state of mind that I have to be in to do that, and I had sort of a slow realisation about my experience of being on social media, which was that I was starting to feel like I was losing touch with the part of myself that could think at its own pace: even, to an extent, the part of myself that had free will.”

This is a typical Lorde sentence: long, self-reflective, intellectual, but also carefully honest, almost confiding. “I was really, really addicted,” she goes on. “And I would feel very tired at the end of the day; a kind of deep exhaustion. And I read some interesting books about it.” (This is also a typical Lorde sentence: she mentions books three times in our conversation.) “And … yeah. Eventually I decided I didn’t want to feel that way any more.”

Breaking the addiction has been “incredible”, she says, looking thrilled. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.” And commercially, despite the theoretical dangers, her inaccessibility seems to have done her no harm. Since she released the title track of Solar Power in June, it has been streamed more than 50 million times, and she has trended globally on Twitter.

“It was clear as day that she was just a rare, rare bird. She always knew exactly what she was doing.”

Even now she has a new album out, she’s not going back online. “Yeah,” says Holt ruefully. “The disappearance is one thing; but the not coming back on when the new album appears is a whole other subject! She does her newsletter” â€" so 1995 â€" “which she felt was the way she wanted to communicate, and which is always a beautiful piece of writing. It also poses a challenge for a record rollout!”

He laughs. “But there is a counter-intuitive strength to it. Everyone else is in there [on social media] and Ella’s saying, ‘Well I’m not in there,’ and so everyone in there talks about her not being in there.”

He shrugs. “With Ella, right from the start, I’ve had a strong sense that we â€" these old white men running a music company â€" were not the ones to be telling her what to do. It was clear as day that she was just a rare, rare bird. She always knew exactly what she was doing.”

“I feel so much more steady in who I am now, I don’t feel like I need to compete with my peers.”Credit:Ben Sklar

Lorde’s origin story sounds like something from a fairy tale: a small child with magical powers is discovered under a toadstool (ie, her bedroom in Devonport) and is, under the watchful gaze of her parents (her mother, Sonja Yelich, a published poet, her father, Vic O’Connor, a civil engineer), brought forth into the world, where her talent, assurance and success astonishes everyone.

That talent, of course, was for writing pop songs (but not writing the actual music: she doesn’t play an instrument). And, as a child, this was her own source of astonishment: the sense of rightness, of certainty, of sheer pleasure it gave her to create songs. Adam Holt first saw her singing in a school video when she was 12. “The first time I met her and her mum and dad, there was just this mop of hair; she barely said boo to a goose! We knew she was a really smart kid â€" she’d already won writing and speaking prizes at school â€" but I always felt she’d be about 18 before she released any music. School was a priority. But then it just happened so much faster.”

Lorde (centre) as a child with her siblings.Credit:@sonjayelich/Instagram

“I always had to wait till the school holidays to do anything,” Lorde recalls. “I had schoolwork all term, then I’d spend every day of the holidays holed up with Joel [Little, her first collaborator, a New Zealand record producer and songwriter]. I was travelling between the North Shore and Morningside in Auckland, and I would have to either walk or bus to the ferry, then a couple of buses or a train to the studio.” She laughs. “It was like two hours either way! And I didn’t have a cell phone with maps on it, so I remember [Joel] drawing me this physical map on a piece of paper, and it always felt like this treasure hunt getting there.”

Every day of the school holidays? You must have really enjoyed it. “Oh yeah, completely.” Lorde nods her head vigorously. “I would do anything to spend that time in the studio. Mum would come and pick me up if the ferry or the train had stopped running, and sometimes I’d get this call: ‘It’s so late! You didn’t call us! It’s 11 o’clock!’ I was so into it. And that was good,” she adds, smiling. “Because there’s definitely a version of my life where I got kicked out of school and smoked too much weed and became a naughty kid.”

Lorde with her parents at the 2014 Grammys, where she won two awards.Credit:Getty Images

Like modern art, pop songs look ridiculously simple from the outside, as if any fool could write them. But in its own way, a great pop song is as complex to create as any artistic masterpiece. In an interview with The New York Times in 2017, Lorde discussed one of Katy Perry’s smash hits, Teenage Dream. “When I put that song on, I’m as moved as I am by anything by David Bowie, by Fleetwood Mac, by Neil Young,” she said. “I have such reverence for the form. A lot of musicians think they can do pop, and the ones who don’t succeed are the ones who don’t have the reverence, who think it’s just a dumb version of other music. You need to be awestruck.”

“I still totally feel that,” she says now, clasping her hands. “I still just love pop so much; it’s my dream. And making it … I feel like I just get to play all day. It’s as much fun now as when I first wrote a pop song and was like, ‘What is this, what is this incredible feeling that I’m feeling?’ It’s still just the same.”

The feeling a great pop song is trying to create is, of course, longing: longing for love or youth or the ability to dance; an inchoate yearning to be driving a convertible down a palm-lined boulevard with the wind in your hair. Pop music articulates an unworthy, but universal, human desire: the dream to be living a bigger, cooler, shinier life.

“I still just love pop so much; it’s my dream. And making it … I feel like I just get to play all day. It’s as much fun now as when I first wrote a pop song.”

The teenage Lorde understood this. Yet she took the tools of pop and did exactly the opposite. At 16, her first global hit, Royals, which won two Grammys, topped the US Top 100 and debuted at No. 1 on the UK singles charts, wasn’t about creating a fantasy life to yearn for. It was describing the life she and her friends actually had, in all its mundane, repetitive ordinariness: a life of pimples and boredom and no money and hair that won’t do what you want.

Her audience â€" teenagers like herself â€" recognised it instantly. The film clip of Royals featured two of Lorde’s real-life friends, Callum and Robbie, teenage boys with painfully obvious Adam’s apples and no muscles, doing what teenagers spend their lives doing: hanging around waiting for something to happen. Yet somehow, using the magic elixir of pop, Lorde made this life cool â€" and all the teenagers living it, including her, cool, too.

This act of identification was the start of a particular love affair between Lorde and her fans. Like Lady Gaga (who calls her followers “my little monsters”; Lorde calls hers “my kids”), and in advance of artists like Billie Eilish, Halsey and Mallrat, she was at one with her people, rather than â€" like the shinier Taylor Swift or, indeed, Katy Perry â€" an overt object of aspiration for them.

Indeed, when Royals was released, Lorde refused to even allow her face to be used in publicity. “I think there was one photo of her, and it was like this.” Adam Holt holds a sheet of blank paper up to his face so only the tip of his head is visible. “The traditional path would have been to totally focus on her, to market her as a child genius. But she just said, ‘No face.’ And we were like, ‘Well, we’re wrestling with this whole new internet world, and she’s a child of that world, so let’s just follow her lead.’ ”

The strategy, of putting an international music industry behemoth at the service of a 15-year-old’s marketing instincts, “worked phenomenally!” Nine years later, Holt is still excited by the memory. “Then she said she wanted to give away the music for free! Which is not our usual MO!”

He laughs. “I did say, ‘Can we have a point in time where we start, you know, selling?’ And three or four months later, when it had been downloaded 60,000 times globally, and gone the equivalent of four times platinum in New Zealand, we flicked the switch to commercial and” â€" he makes a gesture with his arm, like a jet plane taking off â€" “it just took fire.”

Royals has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide; the album it heralded, Pure Heroine, has sold more than five million. Lorde was hailed by critics as a defining pop artist of the decade; The New York Times called her a “wunderkind pop auteur”; David Bowie anointed her “the future of music”. Not bad for a girl still living in her parents’ house with three siblings, many books, and a lot of bad-hair days. But that, after all, was the point.

While still in her teens, David Bowie anointed Lorde “the future of music”.Credit:Ben Sklar

In true fairy tale fashion, Lorde’s best friend is a young woman called Ophelia Mikkelson Jones, who looks exactly like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine (as does Lorde, in her own way). The pair met in their late teens: Lorde was 16 and had just released Royals, Ophelia was at university and making socks in her spare time. (Somehow this seems an intensely New Zealand thing to do: one imagines the wholesome wool, the hand spinning, the soothing click of needles.) Lorde cycled around to Jones’s house in the pouring rain to buy some, and the friendship was born.

The thing about Lorde, says Jones (who is a photographer, and took the startling cover shot of Solar Power, lying on the beach with Lorde jumping over her), is that “I can always tell that she’s observing the world very intensely and beautifully. So when I hear these songs about a summer, or a party, or whatever, it’s like, ‘Oh, I remember that. And you were with us, and you were experiencing the same thing as us, but you were doing something else as well.’ ”

The startling cover shot of Solar Power, taken by her photographer friend Ophelia Mikkelson Jones.

Here it is again: Lorde’s ability to observe, collate and universalise the particularities of her own life. Her second album, Melodrama, released in 2017, was largely written in the aftermath of her break-up with her first serious boyfriend, photographer James Lowe. This was her only public relationship; since then she’s been linked to everyone from Jack Antonoff, her collaborator since 2016, to music executive Justin Warren. Antonoff and Warren have denied these rumours; Lorde preserves a diplomatic silence (though she did once call Antonoff my “songwriting husband”, and explain that the relationship was purely platonic).

Maybe she thinks she’s said everything there is to say about love. She’s certainly pounded away at heartbreak: song after song on Melodrama interrogates the feelings of rage, loss, helplessness, defiance and freedom that the end of a relationship brings. Of course, all of this was exactly what her fans were feeling, too. Even though she was already well and truly a celebrity, she was also still like everyone else. Having your heart broken, feeling alienated from your friends, dancing badly at parties: if these aren’t the universal struggles of your early 20s, what are? Lorde and her fans were still experiencing life together, and Melodrama â€" which was critically and commercially acclaimed, though it never reached the peak of Pure Heroine â€" still spoke to them.

Lorde during her trip to Antarctica in early 2019. “The sort of raw power and intensity of it all kind of put me in my place in a funny way.”Credit:Harry Were

Last year, Lorde went to Antarctica. She’s self-aware enough to make jokes about this (How many pop stars have been to Antarctica? One. How many pop stars are useful in Antarctica? Zero), but it’s also clear she was desperate to go, and prepared to parlay her fame into a trip. (She went as an ambassador with Antarctica New Zealand, a NZ government body; she performed no scientific work, but garnered enormous publicity for the organisation, and the continent.)

“I’ve been completely fascinated by Antarctica since I was a kid,” she says. “We learn about it in school in New Zealand, I’d read tons of biographies about it; it was such a bucket list thing for me. And I had started to engage a lot more with our climate crisis. It felt very abstract to me, and I wanted it to feel more real.”

Did it?

“Well, it did and it didn’t. It’s funny. You go there, and it’s so cold, it’s hard for your brain to compute that the world is actually hotter than it’s ever been, because it’s the coldest you’ve ever been. But just the sort of raw power and intensity of it all kind of put me in my place in a funny way. It’s beautiful, but terrifying as well. It was a very singular experience.”

The trip, about which Lorde produced a quirky book, Going South, which sold out the moment it was published, was actually part of a trajectory that began with her decision to go offline. It’s a course that has been plotted by the new great love of her life: not a man, or a new art form, but what she calls, slightly self-consciously, “the natural world”.

It began when she got home after her Melodrama tour, went offline and got a dog. Pearl was a sweet-faced canine of indeterminate breed whom Lorde adored, describing him as “the shepherd ahead of me”.

“I knew he would be the thing that would take me into the next phase of my life,” she says. “Just going for walks with him. He was really my entry point into being so much more attuned to the natural world. I’ve never been into any kind of religion,” she goes on, “but I realised, ‘Wow. If I go outside, no matter how I’m feeling, it will all be better and clearer and …’ ”

She breaks off. “This is such a hectic chat, isn’t it?” she says, laughing. “You’re going to be like, ‘Oh god: pop star, in California, talking about spirituality, ugh ...’ I’m so sorry! But anyway.” She regathers herself. “Just being outside felt like such a spiritual thing to me. And also, on a simpler level, being at home again I realised that I was having these big dinner parties out in the garden in the summer, you know, and I was really strong and tanned: I could drive a boat and fillet a fish and cook for 20 people! And all the plants in my garden were kind of swaying in the golden light, and it was just magical and fun and … drinking nice tequila … it was all just awesome, and it was all outside!”

It was being in nature, she says, that allowed her to finally process the emotions and demands of Melodrama. “I did have a hard time [with that album], for a lot of reasons,” she agrees. “The work was very heavy; I found it very heavy to be reliving that intense period of my life over and over. And I was at a very tender age, and just like, yeah, very anxious … it was a lot. I felt more adolescent then, weirdly, than I did making Pure Heroine.”

She stops and thinks. “But then, I mean, you just grow up, you know? I feel so much more steady in who I am now, I don’t feel like I need to compete with my peers. I think [with Melodrama] I still sort of felt like, ‘Oh, the music has to get to this number on this chart, and it’s got to sell this many of this,’ and now I’m like, ‘It’s all good. I know that it’ll all be fine, and people will love it.’ ”

Thus was her third album, Solar Power, born: out of pleasure and joy and “that feeling you get lying on the beach with the sun on your face, maybe there’s a drink in your hand, maybe there’s a cute guy over there …  just putting that whole thing together. It’s a sun-worship album.”

As with all her music, she planned it meticulously. “I’ve realised as I’ve got older â€" it’s quite embarrassing â€" but I do make concept albums, pretty much! I think through the whole thing, and I only write the songs that fit the album â€" I never finish anything else.” This time round, she got herself a whiteboard, and wrote ‘Solar Power’ across the top in marker pen. “I had these little columns for everything, and everything colour-coded, and I also had a big running note on my cell phone, and a notebook.”

“I had been imbued â€" he had imbued me â€" with this joy and pleasure in nature, and I just sort of wanted to see it through, and have the experience of making the music be healing. I wanted that refuge.”

Lorde has sound-to-colour synaesthesia, where sounds are linked to colours in her mind, and this album is “gold, I guess. But also water-coloured, and grass: this sort of acid green, aquamarine palette of the water and the grass and the sky. But lots of golds and yellows and oranges and browns. It’s all kind of earthy. And my dog was gold. Gold. He sort of glowed, and I think of his colour as the colour of the album, too.”

Horribly, Pearl died during the making of Solar Power â€" of an unexpected heart attack, in Lorde’s arms. “It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” she says. His death delayed the album, but didn’t derail it. “I was quite a way into making something, and the huge amounts of joy and celebration and spiciness and fun that I had felt, those had been committed, if you like, and I didn’t feel like they were all f…ed or anything.

“Well,” she considers. “I did feel like it was all f…ed for a bit. But I kind of righted course. It took a long time in my personal life, but professionally I felt like I had been imbued â€" he had imbued me â€" with this joy and pleasure in nature, and I just sort of wanted to see it through, and have the experience of making the music be healing. I wanted that refuge.”

It is not, she points out, a climate change album. “It’s good to make that distinction,” she says, “and it’s a distinction I’ve had to make, because I’m a pop star, not a climate scientist! I drive a huge machine that spits out a ton of emissions and uses a ton of resources and for me to be like, ‘Here’s my climate change record,’ would be really misguided and probably harmful.

“I read this really cool thing the other day about the actor Mark Rylance, who’s this sort of climate-minded person. And he said something about, ‘We’ve tried to scare people or make them feel guilty, and that doesn’t work. What we need is to be telling love stories about our planet.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that totally resonates with me.’ And I think that’s what I’ve done.”

Lorde links sounds to colours in her mind. She says Solar Power has “lots of golds and yellows and oranges and browns”.Credit:Ben Sklar

When Lorde released her Solar Power single in June, there was some unexpected publicity: lots of people were amazed, and initially discomfited, that it sounded so much like George Michael’s Freedom, and so much like Primal Scream’s Loaded (even I, pop ignoramus, can hear the similarities). But the people closest to the music were unfazed. Lorde contacted Primal Scream front man Bobby Gillespie, who gave Solar Power his blessing. “He was so lovely about it,” she said at the time. “He was like, ‘You know, these things happen. You caught a vibe that we caught years ago.’ ” And George Michael’s estate said he would have been “flattered” by the comparison.

Questions of attribution aside, Lorde’s Solar Power is exactly what she wanted it to be: a groovy, laid back, Laurel Canyonesque paeon of praise to summer. It’s also light years away from Royals. The video clip is filmed on a beach â€" reportedly on Waiheke Island, close to Auckland â€" but it’s a fantasy beach (a Taylor Swift beach, not a Lorde beach), all perfect white sand and driftwood tepees and swags of pastel muslin swaying in the breeze. Lorde is there, supposedly just, you know, hanging out with her mates. But her mates are all suspiciously beautiful and break into dance routines like a musical cast, and Lorde is wearing a sunshine yellow bikini top and slinky midi skirt by sustainable New York label Collina Strada, for which you wouldn’t get much change out of $NZ1000, and which is hard to imagine anyone actually wearing on an actual beach. Lorde in Collina Strada is not Beyoncé in $10,000-plus Fendi fur, but she’s no everywoman, either.

“It’s a distinction I’ve had to make, because I’m a pop star, not a climate scientist! I drive a huge machine that spits out a ton of emissions and uses a ton of resources.”

Everything in Solar Power is beautifully colour co-ordinated, beautifully polished and beautifully not ordinary â€" most of all Lorde herself. She seems slimmer and more toned than in the past (as my friend and Lorde fan said sadly, “She has abs now”); the mop of hair is gone, replaced by plush dark locks; the make-up is perfect, the skipping across the sand while looking coyly back to camera is artfully graceful. She can even dance. That’s right, you heard it here first. Lorde is now a cool dancer.

If all this sounds like nitpicking, it is. It’s a smooth, sexy song, and people love it. But it also shows that Lorde â€" who, at the ripe old age of 24, has been a pop star for almost a decade â€" is confronting a new challenge. What do you do when your art relies on your ability to universalise shared experience, but your life no longer contains very much shared experience at all?

The truth is, as the years have passed, Lorde’s life has become less and less like those of other people. She’s an internationally recognisable celebrity and multimillionaire. How many 20-somethings can say this? Even on a smaller, more day-to-day scale, how many of the people who love her music have been to Antarctica? How many have deleted all their social media accounts to live a more mindful, outdoors life? How many travel to LA where, as well as treading red carpets, performing on late-night TV and being on the cover of US Rolling Stone, on this trip they’ve been able to be vaccinated against COVID-19, far in advance of the rest of their age cohort? I can tell you how many. Zero.

Still. The lovely thing about Lorde is that she knows all this. She can see the distance between her and her fans: she’s too clever not to. And she thinks she can bridge the gap. In a recent newsletter, she explains that she has two lives: the life of a normal young woman who cooks and gardens and walks the dog, and the life of a pop titan who can “tear apart a festival stage or be in seven countries in seven days”.

“I know now that as hard as I try to run towards or away from one of the sides of my life, they’re both very much who I am,” she writes. “It’s jarring to move between them, but that dichotomy is me.”

Time will tell whether fans accept this â€" accept her. “I am a weird ask,” she says cheerfully, leaning forward, “because I was really big straight away, but really I am a bit more of an acquired taste. I just want to talk about sun worship and transcendentalism and f…ing all the bullshit I want to talk about â€" and I think it took people a minute to figure out where to put me.” She grins.

Maybe this is true. And maybe the reality is that as we get older, we all have less in common with each other. The seismic generalities of adolescence â€" sexual awakening, emotional turmoil, finding our place in the world â€" become the unique particularities of adulthood. Lorde’s life, of course, is particularly unique. But maybe we shouldn’t hold that against her.

Lorde says she has two lives: the life of a normal young woman who cooks and gardens and the life of a pop titan who can “be in seven countries in seven days”.Credit:Ben Sklar

At the end of our conversation, I bring up something that has nothing to do with fame or pop music or saving the world, but that I’ve read Lorde feels passionately about. Perfume. “Perfume?!” cries Lorde, sounding surprised. “Yes! I love!” She sits up straight. “I have such a strong nose, Amanda, that I can identify almost anyone’s perfume. I’m really, really good. I identified one yesterday that … do you know Le Labo fragrances?”

Not at all, I admit.

“It’s this fancy New York brand,” explains Lorde, “and there’s a well-known fragrance from them called Santal. But there’s a kind of jump-off fragrance from another brand that I know smells like that, and that’s the one I identified: the imitation of the original!”

She looks as pleased by this as she has about anything we’ve discussed. “If I made a perfume,” she volunteers, “I always said it would be the fragrance of crushed tomato leaf. You know that smell? Amazing. But I actually recently found a tomato leaves candle by Loewe, so someone’s beat me to that idea.”

Is it any good? She considers. “I’d have a few tweaks, but it’s right in the wheelhouse.”

“Everything’s got a smell to me,” she confesses.

“I wear one scent each [album] cycle. At the moment it’s Mojave Ghost: that sort of desert flower-type smell, quite Californian. I’m sure I’ll spritz that on every night on tour and really go there.” (She’s touring Australia from next March.)

Maybe you could get into producing your own perfume, I suggest.

“Ooooh,” says Lorde. “That’s very pop star.”

Not very sustainable, though.

“I’ll just tell people to crush a tomato leaf.” She stops and squints at me. “Oh, look,” she exclaims, sounding pleased: “Look behind you. The sun’s coming up!”

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Amanda Hooton is a senior writer with Good Weekend.

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