FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Kjell Ruben for Dagens Næringsliv
Part Twenty-Five: Lorde
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THERE have been rumours….
that the New Zealand-born artist, Lorde, has finished work on her third studio album. This is just speculation at present but, as she is back on Instagram and seems to be engaging on social media, maybe 2021 will be a year when we get a follow-up to the incredible Melodrama of 2017. Even though she has put out two studio albums, I think Lorde is an artist who will put out a lot more and will be an icon of the future. I am going to bring in some reviews for Melodrama and a couple of interviews but, back in 2013, she released the incredible Pure Heroine. Whilst she would go on to better herself in 2017, I think her debut is accomplished and boasts many brilliant moments. It is a stunning album with so much unique insight and accessibility. A lot of Pop albums can be quite bland or narrow, yet Pure Heroine is broad and incredibly exciting. With tracks like Tennis Court, Royals, and Buzzcut Season, it is an album that you will go back to and discover new things! Before I drop in reviews of Melodrama, Lorde is bringing out a book next year. Going South is a memoir that documents her experience visiting the continent of Antarctica in January 2019 with photos taken by New Zealand photographer Harriet Were. All proceeds from the book will be used to fund a postgraduate scholarship created by Antarctica New Zealand, a government agency (this is a useful accompanying interview).
That book will be fascinating to read but, in terms of her music, the world was stunned by the phenomenal Melodrama. It was my favourite album of 2017, and there has been a lot of speculation as to when Lorde might produce her next album. One reason why Melodrama got such a big reaction is the sheer consistency of the album. Rough Trade explained the importance of the album (“In 2013, a 16-year-old Lorde quietly, yet confidently asserted herself as the voice of a generation with her full-length debut, Pure Heroine. The album would go triple-platinum, selling over 4 Million worldwide, win two Grammy Awards, a Brit and spawned the seven-times platinum record-breaking international juggernaut single, Royals. And now she is back with her brand new album which tells the story of the last 2 wild, fluorescent years of [her] life. That story, Lorde says, begins with heartbreak. With husky tones and a new radiant feel to her album – including current hit single Green Light - the 20 year old singer has produced a rapturous mix of songs putting her once again at the forefront of pop”); critics reacted with incredible praise and positivity. Melodrama is very different to Pure Heroine and, when in January 2016, it was reported that Lorde and James Lowe, her boyfriend, had ended their three-year relationship, this might have inspired some of the songs and mood on the album.
With Lorde co-writing every track on Melodrama, one does get to hear here experiences and voice. The songs are more confident and memorable than on Pure Heroine; she had grown as a songwriter in the intervening years - and she created this undeniable Pop masterpiece in 2017. On the US Billboard 200, Melodrama debuted at number-one with first-week sales of 109,000 album-equivalent units, of which 82,000 were pure sales - becoming Lorde's first number-one in the United States. I want to bring in a couple of reviews for Melodrama to show what critics made of it. In their review, here is what Pitchfork had to say:
“Her percussive delivery, both in her smoky lower register and lean falsetto, cuts sharpest in the bacchanalian bangers. “Sober” folds humid brass into a stutter that lightly recalls her Heroine hit “Royals,” along deft turns of phrase that suggest even in her imbibing, she’s too sharp to turn off self-scrutiny (“Midnight, lose my mind, I know you’re feeling it too/Can we keep up with the ruse?”). She’s a touch self-deprecating in the height of the party (“Homemade Dynamite”) and tenfold pensive as it wears down (“Perfect Places”). The record’s bittersweet trajectory feels not unlike Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, intent on capturing both the carousing and the come-down in one breathless spree.
And the places Lorde goes on Melodrama really are special, particularly “The Louvre.” This track, in its gleaming synths and heartswell harmonies, captures an immersive bliss, a shared frequency of love just as irrepressibly grandiose as its sound. It’s the kind of connection that, even once it’s gone, lightens your bones forever. Whatever the next “Gossip Girl” is—whatever soapy serial next attempts to harness the teen zeitgeist with plush fabrics and sharp cheekbones—“The Louvre” will probably soundtrack its climactic moment. But as Lorde’s voice rises in it, awed in adoration as she whispers, “Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession,” whatever’s onscreen can’t match her luminosity. It’s not enough to say Lorde is one in a generation. Really, it’s amazing this is the first time she was a teenager for how good she was at it”.
Every track on Melodrama hits the mark! From the incredible opener, Green Light, through to The Louvre, and Liability, to Writer in the Dark, and Supercut, it is a phenomenal album from an artist, I feel, can grow even stronger and more successful. When they reviewed Melodrama, AllMusic wrote the following:
“Growing up in public has been a rite of passage for pop stars since at least Frank Sinatra but, as with any classic storyline, what matters is the execution. Lorde, the preternaturally talented New Zealand singer/songwriter who became an international sensation at the age of 17, knows how to execute not only songwriting and public narrative but also a melding of the two. Melodrama, arriving nearly four long years after her 2013 debut, picks up the thread left hanging on Pure Heroine, presenting Lorde as a young woman, not a sullen teenager. Tonally and thematically, it's a considerable shift from Pure Heroine, and Melodrama feels different musically too, thanks in part to Lorde's decision to collaborate with Jack Antonoff, the leader of Fun. and Bleachers who has been nearly omnipresent in 2010s pop/rock. Antonoff's steely signatures -- a reliance on retro synths, a sheen so glassy it glares -- are all over the place on Melodrama but Lorde is unquestionably the auteur of the album, not just because the songs tease at autobiography but because of how it builds upon Pure Heroine.
Lorde retains her bookish brooding, but Melodrama isn't monochromatic. "Green Light" opens the proceedings with a genuine sense of exuberance and it's an emotion she returns to often, sometimes reveling in its joy, sometimes adding an undercurrent of melancholy. Sadness bubbles to the surface on occasion, as it does on the stark "Liability," and so does Lorde's penchant for blunt literalism -- "Writer in the Dark," where our narrator sings "bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark," thereby suggesting all of her songs are some kind of autobiography -- but these traits don't occupy the heart of the album. Instead, Lorde is embracing all the possibilities the world has to offer but then retreating to the confines of home, so she can process everything she's experienced. This balance between discovery and reflection gives Melodrama a tension, but the addition of genuine, giddy pleasure -- evident on the neon pulse of "Homemade Dynamite" and "Supercut" -- isn't merely a progression for Lorde, it's what gives the album multiple dimensions”.
With positive signs that a new album might be coming soon, it will be amazing to what she produces next. I think Melodrama is such a huge and important album that everyone needs to hear and spend some serious time with.
I want to bring in a couple of interviews to end, as they show more of Lorde and how she engages with those she speaks with. This interview from The Guardian (2017) reveals some of that, but we also get some history behind Melodrama and insight into the brilliant Lorde:
“Through 2015, it became trickier for those outside Lorde’s sphere to follow what she was up to. She is not much of a presence on social media (vowing at one point that “all words [will] go into songs instead of tweets”), and though she performed the odd one-off show, provided vocals for a Disclosure track, and worked on the soundtrack for a Hunger Games film, she faded from frontline view. Having been seen and heard by the world, she wanted to resume, as much as possible, her old life with her friends. “Hugs and dinners,” she describes it. “Trips to the beach. Going to dumb bars in the middle of intersections.”
She moved into the waterside house in Auckland on her own. “I come from a big family,” she explains. (Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is a poet and academic, her father, Vic O’Connor, is a civil engineer; Lorde is the second of four siblings.) “We grew up in a house full of love and activity and screaming and crying. When I bought the house, people asked: ‘Isn’t it going to be strange living by yourself?’ And I was like: ‘No! I adore the feeling of being able to spread out my brain.’”
Aware that she couldn’t put off work on her second album for ever, she started assembling notes and ideas on the coffee table in her lounge. This was hastily covered with a towel whenever friends visited: she wasn’t especially proud of the half-formed work. “I was writing about nothing. I wasn’t in the right zone. [These songs] would pass off fine, but they meant nothing to me. I was writing stuff that maybe sounded cool, that were trying to be cool. But they weren’t vividly me.”
In the summer of 2016, she and Antonoff wrote a Royals-calibre track called Green Light. It charted the contradictory impressions of a person in the aftermath of a break-up, someone waiting for internal permission – a green light – before they can get on and be high-spirited again. They wrote another song, Homemade Dynamite, about just such a phase of high-spiritedness. On stage at Coachella, Lorde says Homemade Dynamite is about that time in an evening when “maybe the drugs are just kicking in”. For a track called Writer In The Dark, she composed a neat central lyric that seemed to summarise a year of ruthless story-gathering back in Auckland. “Bet you rue the day,” Lorde sings at an unnamed lover, “you kissed a writer in the dark.”
“I want to be really, really good one day,” Lorde says. Her legs start to twitch again. Her arms begin to flail, making their shapes. “I think I’m pretty good now. I think I’ve made a good start. But I want to be Paul Simon.” She thumps her hands down hard on the table. “I want to be Leonard Cohen.” (Thump.) “I want to be Joni.” (Thump.) “Fucking.” (Thump.) “Mitchell.” (Thump.) “And that takes time.”
Before that can happen I ask Lorde about something she’d said earlier – about how when she first blasted onto the scene, she felt as if she had “a two-part self”: half doubtful young person, half self-possessed performer, neither side fully reconciled with the other. Is that still the case?
“That gap has started to lessen,” she says. “I’m starting to be able to recognise myself in the work. It’s like there’s more of an overlap?... They’re almost...” For the first time today Lorde can’t summon the precise words she’s after. So she uses her hands instead. “Now it feels more like this,” she says, cupping one hand inside the other. “See?”.
There are a lot of great interviews out there that were published at the time Melodrama was released. We get information regarding Lorde’s songwriting process and approach, but there is also some brilliant information about her young life and what she is like to meet in person. I would recommend people to read the full article from The New York Times Magazine, as it is incredibly detailed…and we get some fascinating insight (such as why she likes travelling around New York on her own). I have selected a few sections, so we get some biography relating to Lorde; there is also some great information regarding the creation of Melodrama and its fruition:
“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 anthologized 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. Shortly afterward, she sat for a morning-show interview on Radio NZ, estimating that she’d read “a bit more than 1,000 books” in her lifetime. She wrote her own fiction too, enamored of Raymond Carver and Kurt Vonnegut. When I asked her to characterize this work, she said only, “It wasn’t very good.” Sonja Yelich told me that when Ella was 14, she proofread Yelich’s 40,000-word master’s thesis: “People said, ‘You’re crazy to entrust this massive undertaking to your child.’ ” (Yelich has routinely accompanied Ella on her travels and is as much confidante as chaperone. You can see her dancing beside Taylor Swift in a 2014 awards-show cutaway as her daughter performs.)
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. As we rumbled northward, her face was in full fluorescent light, and I wondered if people ever bothered her during these rides. “Nobody recognizes me,” she said. When Lorde does spot someone spotting her, she went on, her move is to smile, place a finger to her lips and mouth a conspiratorial shh. Her thinking is that this gesture, warm and direct in its appeal, will pre-empt any further encounter — “and it usually does.”
As Lorde worked on “Melodrama” at home in New Zealand, she papered over a wall with notes for songs, like a sleuth tacking up scraps of evidence, trying to tease out their connections and fill in their blanks. This allowed her to “skim the whole album,” she said, and “to make sure I was touching all the bases I wanted to touch: ‘Oh, I haven’t said this, so let me find a good place to do it.’ ” She soon devised color codings for each song, with different hues denoting different themes. “A song about partying would get a certain color,” she explained, “but it might be a sad song, and that got its own color, too.” As she studied the wall, patterns and imbalances emerged: not enough red here; too much yellow there. On her kitchen table she arranged yet more paper, editing and shuffling lyrics around. When friends visited, she hid the table beneath a patchwork of hastily arranged bath towels and instructed them to steer clear.
Her songs reflected her generation not only in their lyrics but also in their shrugging relationship to genre. Formerly ironclad distinctions among musical styles have significantly melted away. Even mash-ups — those early-aughts song splices that epitomized a dawning spirit of digital-age musical cross-pollination — sound dated now in their stuntish aesthetic of collision. In 2011 I asked Frank Ocean, then 24, about his genre-skipping approach to source material on “Nostalgia, Ultra,” his R.&B. mixtape that includes samples of Coldplay and “Hotel California.” He said he was confused by the question: The concept of border-crossing made little sense to him because he didn’t see the borders I was alluding to in the first place”.
A good gap of time has passed since Melodrama was released on 16th June, 2017. There has been a lot of change in Lorde’s life, but I wouldn’t expect a radical departure from the sound of Melodrama. If we get something half as good as that album then we will be in for a real treat! As I said, I think Lorde will grow greater and more profound as a writer and performer and, as she is only twenty-four, that is quite scary! I feel we will get a lot of albums from Lorde through her career, and I know she has already inspired so many songwriters. She will be a legend of the future, no doubt. The more I listen to Lorde, the more I realise she is…
A hugely talented and accomplished artist.