Rising star: The return of pop star Lorde

It’s been four years since her debut album, but Lorde is now ready for the crown, writes Jonah Weiner.

Lorde, the New Zealand-born pop star, came into the fire-lit lounge of her downtown Manhattan hotel a few minutes past 11, apologising for the lateness of the hour — funny story, she said.

She’d been commuting daily to a Greenwich Village recording studio, plugging away at new music, but today U2, who had reserved the space, arrived and commandeered it.

Lorde found a smaller studio available farther uptown, and though the move was inconvenient, she saw the humour in being inadvertently evicted by Bono — it was just one more marker of how strange her life has been since she became famous, four years ago, at 16.

A late-winter blizzard was forecast to blow into town that night, and Lorde was dressed for the cold in pointy black boots and a voluminous Chloé overcoat.

She’d sent me a message earlier on, hinting at some unspecified adventure. Now, boots clacking, she led me around the corner and into an elevator, where she fished a stubby key from her pocket.

“We’re going out a secret way,” she said, turning a lock on the wall.

Lorde onstage in New York. Picture: Roger Kisby/ Getty Images

Lorde owns a house in Auckland, where she grew up, but for the better part of the last year she has been living at different hotels around New York, trying to finish her second album, Melodrama.

She began writing it about three years ago, first in her childhood home and later at a villa she bought on what she described as the other, fancier side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbor.

Lorde has a neurological condition known as sound-to-colour synesthesia — when she hears certain notes and sounds, corresponding colours appear — and she describes making music in intensely visual terms.

“From the moment I start something, I can see the finished song, even if it’s far-off and foggy,” she said.

Her goal is to correct the colours and sharpen the contours until the precise configuration of chords, rhythms, emotions, and textures she has been glimpsing all along snaps into focus.

“It’s about getting the actual thing to sound like what I’ve been seeing.”

The elevator opened onto a barren nether-floor, where Lorde took a narrow staircase down to a service exit.

This hotel often hosted celebrities, she explained — “You might see Meryl Streep; you might even see a Jonas Brother” — who, in turn, drew photographers.

She’d gotten this key from management so that she could come and go without worrying about cameras.

The album that made Lorde a celebrity, Pure Heroine, came out in 2013. It was a marvel of understatement — unhurried electronic beats, pared-down harmonies, empty spaces.

Her lyrics brought an unlikely incandescence to avowedly mundane snapshots of suburban teendom.

Pure Heroine sold more than 1m copies in five months, making Lorde the first female artist with a million-selling debut album since Adele and establishing her as a wunderkind pop auteur.

Kanye West introduced himself as a fan; Taylor Swift became a buddy; David Bowie clasped Lorde’s hands in his and proclaimed that listening to her music “felt like listening to tomorrow”.

The question nagging her here in New York, as she worked to meet the new album’s June release date, was what the day after tomorrow sounded like.

We pushed through the service exit, walked along empty streets and boarded an uptown 1 train. While making Melodrama, Lorde took lots of subway rides, auditioning rough mixes of songs on cheap earbuds, which helped give her a sense of how the music would sound in daily life.

Our destination was a diner near Columbus Circle called the Flame, which sat beneath a Qi Gong parlour and whose brick facade was nondescript in the extreme.

Lorde discovered the Flame by chance one night in 2013, during her first trip to the US, lured by nothing more tantalising than the neon sign reading OPEN 24 HOURS.

Over subsequent visits, she developed a deep attachment to the place; its unchanging vinyl upholstery, grid-patterned pendant shades, and Italian omelettes helped to make an increasingly untethered existence feel more rooted.

“Some low-key genius did the decorating,” she said.

“There’s something beautiful in every corner.”

Adding to the charm was that “mostly old people eat here. There’s no one famous. No one cares about me.”

Lorde performing at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Picture: Mark Davis/Getty Images

The Flame played an important part in the making of Melodrama, she said: “I spent about four months here last year with my laptop out and my headphones on, listening to demos, looking at lists of what I needed to get done and writing songs. People must have thought I was an aspiring poet or something.”

She sat for hours at a time, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the dead of night.

All the while, overhead speakers piped in top-40 radio, which, she said, “can be distracting when you’re trying to write pop music. So I wore these enormous headphones to block it out.”

But sometimes she removed the headphones and let the songs wash over her.

She has been fascinated by pop music, relating to it in both intuitive and analytical ways, since early adolescence, when, she has said, she would play tracks by Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado on repeat, trying to figure out their magic.

TODAY popstars risk becoming mere “content producers”, hoping we’ll swipe over to their magnum opuses amid the competing distractions on our phones.

Most A-list artists respond by working tirelessly to make sure we don’t forget them, with floods of albums, songs, cameos, and headlines that will, ideally, confer upon them an aura of omnipresence, if not permanence.

Some others — Adele, Frank Ocean — have made a case for scarcity, though, maintaining ghostlike profiles before delivering triumphant returns that feel all the more momentous for the years-long hiatuses that preceded them.

Lorde was now staring down a four-year hiatus of her own.

In the wake of her first album, she’d found much to enjoy about fame: filling in for Kurt Cobain alongside Nirvana’s surviving members at the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony; befriending artists like the writer Miranda July and the Swedish pop-music mastermind Max Martin; inspiring a multi-episode South Park parody; and overseeing a Hunger Games soundtrack.

But she also wondered if it was possible to return to some approximation of her previous life, so after she finished touring for Pure Heroine, she pulled back from public view.

Among other things, this meant hanging out with old friends in Auckland “who couldn’t care less about my music career”, she said, and a trip by helicopter to a rental house on a remote island called Waiheke, in New Zealand, where she wrote songs without distraction.

There were false starts, fruitless detours, and stretches of inactivity as she tried to plot her way forward: “I had to sort of write my way out of the last album,” she said.

Things got more complicated in 2015, when she and her longtime boyfriend, an Auckland-based photographer named James Lowe, broke up.

Amid this unhappy circumstance, another path presented itself for her songwriting.

“After your heart is broken, music enters you on a new level,” said Lorde.

“You suddenly find yourself crying when ‘Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart’ ” — an aching Alicia Keys track — “comes on.”

(Lorde declined to specify the reasons for the split.)

She decided the new album would grapple with emotions and insights stemming from the breakup. For the first time in her adult life, she was single. What was it like to be on a dance floor, to desire someone else on it and to act on this desire? How did it feel to wake up the next morning? She emphasised that Melodrama wasn’t a “breakup album”. Instead, she said, “it’s a record about being alone. The good parts and the bad parts”.

Pure Heroine was the work of just two writers: Lorde and a musician named Joel Little, whose most prominent job till then was as the frontman for a New Zealand pop-punk group.

She initially reunited with him for Melodrama but came to believe that she needed a new conspirator to truly move beyond Pure Heroine.

In early 2014 she met Jack Antonoff, who plays the guitar with the band fun and makes music on his own under the name Bleachers.

They had a mutual friend in Taylor Swift, who hired Antonoff while making her last album, 1989. After a few exploratory sessions, she took him on as her main co-writer.

In March 2016, Lorde began writing a new track called ‘Sober’, whose pointed juxtaposition of pleasure (“My hips have missed your hips”) and foreboding (“What will we do when we’re sober?”) convinced her once and for all that she was onto something good.

By this time, fans were demanding new music from Lorde with mounting impatience on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

In no mood to rush things, she tried to tune these voices out — but it was reassuring, all the same, to know that they still cared about her.

Last March, Lorde finally released the first single from Melodrama, called ‘Green Light’. Two nights before our trip to the Flame, Lorde performed ‘Green Light’ on Saturday Night Live.

Later she sang a piano ballad called ‘Liability’, about how being an artist in the public eye can make you radioactive to those close to you.

Taking quite so much time on Melodrama was never Lorde’s masterplan. But follow-ups are hard to make and can be especially vexing when they follow smash debuts.

LORDE, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, was born in 1996, the second of four children; her father, Vic O’Connor, is a civil engineer.

Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is an award-winning poet whose work has been anthologised multiple times in the Best New Zealand Poems series. Ella was a bookish kid.

She led her middle-school team to a second-place finish in the 2009 Kids’ Lit Quiz World Finals, a global competition.

Ella joined student musicals and began performing acoustic Amy Winehouse and Kings of Leon covers around Auckland with a friend named Louis, who played the guitar while she sang.

In August 2009, Louis’s father emailed a recording of the pair performing Duffy’s ‘Warwick Avenue’ to Scott Maclachlan, an A&R executive at Universal New Zealand.

Maclachlan wasn’t looking for a guitarist, but Ella’s voice intrigued him. He signed her to a development deal and worked, until a couple of years ago, as her manager.

Maclachlan finally found her a partner in Little. As things progressed, she assumed the name Lord, tacking on an E as a feminine detournement. She’d long been interested in “aristocracy”, she told me, “and the Ivy Leagues and final clubs and old-money families and the concept of old money — I just find it all fascinating”.

A couple of days after our diner visit, Lorde invited me to a studio session.

Her bugbear at the moment was a song called ‘Perfect Places’, about going to parties and hooking up, in which she pierces an atmosphere of hedonism with stabs of melancholy — a recurring technique across the album.

She and Antonoff had an idea in mind for the hook: What if a mass of multitracked Lordes came in, belting out the words together beneath the main vocal like a choir of clones? She approached a microphone beside the mixing board to try it out.

The hook featured an emphatic confession: “Now I can’t stand to be alone.”

Lorde said that for a while these eight syllables were “Now I don’t know which way to go,” but those words felt wishy-washy, and she knew they wouldn’t stick.

While Lorde argues that writing great pop lyrics tends to mean “pushing past cliches to a more specific truth”, there are nonetheless times when nothing will capture that specific truth better than the familiar phrase: “‘I can’t stand to be alone,”’ she says.

“That’s why I go out.”

She moved on to an untitled ballad with something of a soft-rock vibe. It had a slow-burning section, built around piano chords, for which Lorde had yet to find a lyric or melody.

“I was thinking ‘hard feelings’ could work here,” she told Antonoff, explaining to me that “I have these phrases banging around that we try to find homes for”.

She approached the microphone again.

They listened to the playback. “See, I think -lings is hooky,” said Lorde.

Antonoff nodded.

He said the song put him pleasantly in mind of Don Henley’s 1989 hit, ‘The Heart of the Matter’, in which he grapples with news that a past lover has met someone new, then laments other bygone relationships.

“I love that genre of a breakup song, where it’s the calm after a big fight,” said Antonoff.

It was a deeply uncool reference, but Lorde nodded enthusiastically.

“This song is the moment of calm before you start raging,” she replied.

“I remember this being so jarring while it was happening, like, Oh, this is that moment in the breakup. Until now the two of you were concentric circles, but the instant you get out of this car, you are only going to get farther apart from each other.”

Lorde ended the session in good spirits: Things were moving in the right direction. She said goodbye to Antonoff and reserved a table for dinner at the Waverly Inn.

Like the Flame, this West Village restaurant had become one of Lorde’s favoured New York haunts, but it was a universe apart.

The Saturday Night Live personality Colin Jost was one table over, and as we waited for our menus, Lorde pointed across the room: “I saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg at that table one night.”

There can be a feeling of hypocrisy, verging on betrayal, when artists who first introduced themselves as outsiders go on to enjoy success and, with it, consummately insiderish pleasures. Lorde has been a careful steward of her own image from the start.

In 2012, as she prepared to post her first EP, The Love Club, as a free download, label executives encouraged her to pose for press photographs.

She rejected this idea, inspired by artists like the Weeknd and Burial, who came up outside the major-label system and began celebrated careers online under cloaks of anonymity.

I was staying a short walk from Lorde’s hotel, so after we ate I hitched a ride in her chauffeured SUV. Every corner was piled high with blackening snow.

“I’ve never seen New York like this,” she said as we pulled away from the curb, tires crunching.

After a few blocks, Lorde took out her phone and explained that she was eager to listen to one of the songs she’d worked on that day. Could we not talk for a bit?

“Give me three minutes, I’m sorry,” she said. “I like to play things when I’m moving.”

Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer for the magazine and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine