She's the pop phenomenon of 2013, chalking up No 1s around the world, signing a £1.5m deal and hanging out with Bowie. How does it feel to go from obscurity to global stardom in a few months – and all as you turn 17?
Ella Yelich-O'Connor is sitting on the floor of a dressing room in Auckland, New Zealand. I can't actually see her – we're talking on the phone. Most days she gets up around dawn to navigate the 12-hour-plus time difference between her home country and press requests across Europe and America. As far as I recall, getting up at dawn is not easy when you're 17. "I'm pretty good at telling people I have to keep normal hours," she corrects me. "You can work hard and make it manageable." There's that distinctive voice, so low and adult, only the odd conversational dead end revealing the last traces of teenage awkwardness. On the day we talk she'll open the Vodafone New Zealand music awards with a "freestyle" reworking of Royals, which – in case you've been somewhere else for the past three months – is the sound of 2013, totally and absolutely, in that way a magic pop song can occasionally take over a year.
Yelich-O'Connor – or Lorde, as she is now known around the world – knew Royals was going to be a hit. The formula was original: a playground chant, a cavernous hip-hop beat, harmonies that disappear upwards like wisps of smoke, and most importantly a message – a dry comment on the excesses of pop culture, "using the medium I was criticising to make my point". New York mayor-elect Bill de Blasio used Royals as his victory song when he took the podium in Manhattan's Park Slope on 6 November. The following week, Lorde returned to her old school in Auckland, Belmont Intermediate, to judge a talent contest, and 500 pupils sang it to welcome her – a throaty child army, faintly formidable like Pink Floyd's urchins in The Wall. It was the song of suburban children after all: "That kind of lux just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzz." As the year draws to a close, adults the world over can rest easy that the youngest generation is not entirely lost to the cult of Miley Cyrus's celebrity rear. As Lorde puts it today, almost deadpan: "I don't think people look at how pop stars live and feel anything aspirational at all."
The other day, I came across a long profile on Lorde written by a New Zealand journalist who had researched her for the best part of a year – a year! – conducting "exclusive" interviews with her parents (a poet mother and an engineer father, of Croatian and Irish ancestry respectively) and the teachers of the girl who, at six, was declared to have a mental age of 21. It was a remarkable piece of PR for someone who a year ago was completely unknown, but then Lorde arrived on the scene with a post-Gaga sense of the inevitability of her own stardom. It was all there in the lyrics: "Very soon I'll be getting on my first plane"; "Let me be your ruler"; "I'm coming for the crown."
"I was kind of pre-emptive," she says. "I wasn't necessarily saying I'd definitely be famous but there were requests from labels, people were pulling me overseas. At the same time this sense of huge change approaching was coupled with nostalgia – you're thinking about your home town, sitting in your friendships, mucking around, waiting for your life to start."
She was signed at 12 by Universal New Zealand: her manager Scott Maclachlan, who launched Groove Armada and Basement Jaxx in the UK, had emigrated to the country with his wife and was cracking his knuckles for a new project when – as the story goes – he received a clip of her singing Duffy's Warwick Avenue at a school talent show. Lorde was offered a soul covers album to start with, but said no: she wanted to write her own songs. Then there's a gap in her history where, presumably, she was learning how to do so (her debut album, Pure Heroine, was co-written with 30-year-old Auckland musician Joel Little) – and then boom: a hit single and album appear in the US and UK within weeks of each other. Lorde's people avoided the main pitfall of modern pop marketing that damaged everyone from Little Boots to Lana Del Rey, whereby one great song comes out when there's no other material to support it, and by the time there's an album, the tide has turned, the bloggers are bored, and no one cares any more.
In the past three weeks alone she has performed on The Late Show With David Letterman, given a MOMA benefit, staged by Chanel and attended by David Bowie in honour of Tilda Swinton ("a real hero of mine," she tells me, " the woman is a goddess"), topped Time magazine's list of the world's most influential teenagers and signed a $2.5m publishing deal. She is also writing songs for other people, she is keen to point out; today everyone from Emeli Sandé to Jessie J runs a sideline in professional songsmithing: it suggests you're a long-term concern. "Someone sends me a beat," she explains, "or they say, I've got this hook: and I'm doing all the verses, that kind of thing. I'm travelling so much at the moment that there's no time to get in a room with anyone, and it's a pretty solitary occupation. But I like having to step into someone else's voice. It's a fun thing, very different to writing your own songs – it's more detached and free." Can she tell us who she's been writing for?
"Nope."
I had to try.
"No problem."
Lorde had no idea that New York's new mayor had commandeered her music, but it was "quite a casual usage, which is fine," she says. "Political campaigns are a bit of a grey area. I've had some surprises, but for the most part I keep quite a tight rein on my stuff. I've said yes to 5% to 10% of all the requests that I've had." What would she say no to? I'm reminded of Queen's Brian May who, being a vegetarian, once said that he would not license the band's music to sell meat. "I'm quite careful about product advertisements. I'd have to have some kind of personal affiliation with the product which is, you know, rare for me. If something was unhealthy or not promoting a good body image, I'd take it into consideration."
Reading this on mobile? Click here to watch video
Earlier this year she declared herself a feminist with a refreshing "why wouldn't I be?" When she turned up to her old school she was wearing a thick, grey linen cotton dress that hung below the knees, with a high neckline and long sleeves. With that wall of black hair and defiant features she reminds me more of Darlene Conner from Roseanne than any more recent teen creation – the kind of girl who is unnaturally smart without necessarily trying to be an adult, and rooted in the days of grunge when even the coolest kid in school could go around relatively unadorned. Lorde recently said that Taylor Swift is "too perfect"; of Selena Gomez's hit song Come and Get Me she remarked, "I'm sick of women being portrayed in this way", while Lana Del Rey – whose languid, urban pop-noir influenced her own music – was a bad example to girls with her "shirt-tugging, desperate, don't leave me stuff". Then there was her expert dismissal of Miley Cyrus: "Having been in an institution like Disney all her life, it's important she has fun." But as a number of subsequent apologies would suggest, the disses were a learning curve; Lorde spent the bulk of her early interviews being pushed into the gladiator ring with pretty much every other female pop star on the planet and asked to pass comment for the sake of a headline.
"It just seems so strange to me, the way the media pits girls against each other to make sure there's always some battle like that going on," she says today. "If one male singer was to make any kind of comment about another, it wouldn't be a 'cat fight'. It's incredibly unsubtle: you can hear people trying to get their headline, and I'm getting good at saying, 'I don't know, what do you think?' and they just sort of flounder. Nobody asks me about what male musicians I think about; I only ever get asked about females."
Perhaps the girl-on-girl pantomime is the reason she talks only about male influences on her music today. The first song that captured her imagination as a child was One Love by Blue: "That was a gem. I was always drawn to songs with that innate catchiness." She recently went back and listened to "all the stuff I pretended to like when I was 13", such as Talking Heads. And during the writing of Pure Heroine, it was Kanye West and Jay-Z's bombastic 2011 album Watch the Throne that inspired her the most: "I look to Kanye for inspiration in a lot of things, and his ability to kind of reinvent and keep throwing curveballs with each record. He's able to keep things interesting, and keep people following him, after what has been quite a lengthy career."
One message in her second single, Tennis Court, is that young people are afraid of getting older. It's one of the many things in her music that strikes the rare note of being both true and surprising at the same time. Is she afraid of the future? Doesn't she look at pop stars we got bored with so fast and worry that the same is going to happen to her?
"I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. I'm 17 now: what happens by the time I'm 21, am I a burn-out or something? Will they still listen to my record?" People are, she admits, more obsessed with her youth than she'd imagined they would be.
"I thought that it would be a thing when they first heard about me, and then it would stop being a thing, but no," she says. "I've been in some situations where people have treated me like a fascinating toy. You know, it's just like an interesting kind of fun thing to have a play with. It's very weird for me. I feel like a tiny baby. But it's all relative: when you're my age in particular, every year feels like a massive change. The difference between 15 and 17 is colossal for everyone." Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.
Ella Yelich-O'Connor is sitting on the floor of a dressing room in Auckland, New Zealand. I can't actually see her – we're talking on the phone. Most days she gets up around dawn to navigate the 12-hour-plus time difference between her home country and press requests across Europe and America. As far as I recall, getting up at dawn is not easy when you're 17. "I'm pretty good at telling people I have to keep normal hours," she corrects me. "You can work hard and make it manageable." There's that distinctive voice, so low and adult, only the odd conversational dead end revealing the last traces of teenage awkwardness. On the day we talk she'll open the Vodafone New Zealand music awards with a "freestyle" reworking of Royals, which – in case you've been somewhere else for the past three months – is the sound of 2013, totally and absolutely, in that way a magic pop song can occasionally take over a year.
Yelich-O'Connor – or Lorde, as she is now known around the world – knew Royals was going to be a hit. The formula was original: a playground chant, a cavernous hip-hop beat, harmonies that disappear upwards like wisps of smoke, and most importantly a message – a dry comment on the excesses of pop culture, "using the medium I was criticising to make my point". New York mayor-elect Bill de Blasio used Royals as his victory song when he took the podium in Manhattan's Park Slope on 6 November. The following week, Lorde returned to her old school in Auckland, Belmont Intermediate, to judge a talent contest, and 500 pupils sang it to welcome her – a throaty child army, faintly formidable like Pink Floyd's urchins in The Wall. It was the song of suburban children after all: "That kind of lux just ain't for us, we crave a different kind of buzz." As the year draws to a close, adults the world over can rest easy that the youngest generation is not entirely lost to the cult of Miley Cyrus's celebrity rear. As Lorde puts it today, almost deadpan: "I don't think people look at how pop stars live and feel anything aspirational at all."
The other day, I came across a long profile on Lorde written by a New Zealand journalist who had researched her for the best part of a year – a year! – conducting "exclusive" interviews with her parents (a poet mother and an engineer father, of Croatian and Irish ancestry respectively) and the teachers of the girl who, at six, was declared to have a mental age of 21. It was a remarkable piece of PR for someone who a year ago was completely unknown, but then Lorde arrived on the scene with a post-Gaga sense of the inevitability of her own stardom. It was all there in the lyrics: "Very soon I'll be getting on my first plane"; "Let me be your ruler"; "I'm coming for the crown."
"I was kind of pre-emptive," she says. "I wasn't necessarily saying I'd definitely be famous but there were requests from labels, people were pulling me overseas. At the same time this sense of huge change approaching was coupled with nostalgia – you're thinking about your home town, sitting in your friendships, mucking around, waiting for your life to start."
She was signed at 12 by Universal New Zealand: her manager Scott Maclachlan, who launched Groove Armada and Basement Jaxx in the UK, had emigrated to the country with his wife and was cracking his knuckles for a new project when – as the story goes – he received a clip of her singing Duffy's Warwick Avenue at a school talent show. Lorde was offered a soul covers album to start with, but said no: she wanted to write her own songs. Then there's a gap in her history where, presumably, she was learning how to do so (her debut album, Pure Heroine, was co-written with 30-year-old Auckland musician Joel Little) – and then boom: a hit single and album appear in the US and UK within weeks of each other. Lorde's people avoided the main pitfall of modern pop marketing that damaged everyone from Little Boots to Lana Del Rey, whereby one great song comes out when there's no other material to support it, and by the time there's an album, the tide has turned, the bloggers are bored, and no one cares any more.
In the past three weeks alone she has performed on The Late Show With David Letterman, given a MOMA benefit, staged by Chanel and attended by David Bowie in honour of Tilda Swinton ("a real hero of mine," she tells me, " the woman is a goddess"), topped Time magazine's list of the world's most influential teenagers and signed a $2.5m publishing deal. She is also writing songs for other people, she is keen to point out; today everyone from Emeli Sandé to Jessie J runs a sideline in professional songsmithing: it suggests you're a long-term concern. "Someone sends me a beat," she explains, "or they say, I've got this hook: and I'm doing all the verses, that kind of thing. I'm travelling so much at the moment that there's no time to get in a room with anyone, and it's a pretty solitary occupation. But I like having to step into someone else's voice. It's a fun thing, very different to writing your own songs – it's more detached and free." Can she tell us who she's been writing for?
"Nope."
I had to try.
"No problem."
Lorde had no idea that New York's new mayor had commandeered her music, but it was "quite a casual usage, which is fine," she says. "Political campaigns are a bit of a grey area. I've had some surprises, but for the most part I keep quite a tight rein on my stuff. I've said yes to 5% to 10% of all the requests that I've had." What would she say no to? I'm reminded of Queen's Brian May who, being a vegetarian, once said that he would not license the band's music to sell meat. "I'm quite careful about product advertisements. I'd have to have some kind of personal affiliation with the product which is, you know, rare for me. If something was unhealthy or not promoting a good body image, I'd take it into consideration."
Reading this on mobile? Click here to watch video
Earlier this year she declared herself a feminist with a refreshing "why wouldn't I be?" When she turned up to her old school she was wearing a thick, grey linen cotton dress that hung below the knees, with a high neckline and long sleeves. With that wall of black hair and defiant features she reminds me more of Darlene Conner from Roseanne than any more recent teen creation – the kind of girl who is unnaturally smart without necessarily trying to be an adult, and rooted in the days of grunge when even the coolest kid in school could go around relatively unadorned. Lorde recently said that Taylor Swift is "too perfect"; of Selena Gomez's hit song Come and Get Me she remarked, "I'm sick of women being portrayed in this way", while Lana Del Rey – whose languid, urban pop-noir influenced her own music – was a bad example to girls with her "shirt-tugging, desperate, don't leave me stuff". Then there was her expert dismissal of Miley Cyrus: "Having been in an institution like Disney all her life, it's important she has fun." But as a number of subsequent apologies would suggest, the disses were a learning curve; Lorde spent the bulk of her early interviews being pushed into the gladiator ring with pretty much every other female pop star on the planet and asked to pass comment for the sake of a headline.
"It just seems so strange to me, the way the media pits girls against each other to make sure there's always some battle like that going on," she says today. "If one male singer was to make any kind of comment about another, it wouldn't be a 'cat fight'. It's incredibly unsubtle: you can hear people trying to get their headline, and I'm getting good at saying, 'I don't know, what do you think?' and they just sort of flounder. Nobody asks me about what male musicians I think about; I only ever get asked about females."
Perhaps the girl-on-girl pantomime is the reason she talks only about male influences on her music today. The first song that captured her imagination as a child was One Love by Blue: "That was a gem. I was always drawn to songs with that innate catchiness." She recently went back and listened to "all the stuff I pretended to like when I was 13", such as Talking Heads. And during the writing of Pure Heroine, it was Kanye West and Jay-Z's bombastic 2011 album Watch the Throne that inspired her the most: "I look to Kanye for inspiration in a lot of things, and his ability to kind of reinvent and keep throwing curveballs with each record. He's able to keep things interesting, and keep people following him, after what has been quite a lengthy career."
One message in her second single, Tennis Court, is that young people are afraid of getting older. It's one of the many things in her music that strikes the rare note of being both true and surprising at the same time. Is she afraid of the future? Doesn't she look at pop stars we got bored with so fast and worry that the same is going to happen to her?
"I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. I'm 17 now: what happens by the time I'm 21, am I a burn-out or something? Will they still listen to my record?" People are, she admits, more obsessed with her youth than she'd imagined they would be.
"I thought that it would be a thing when they first heard about me, and then it would stop being a thing, but no," she says. "I've been in some situations where people have treated me like a fascinating toy. You know, it's just like an interesting kind of fun thing to have a play with. It's very weird for me. I feel like a tiny baby. But it's all relative: when you're my age in particular, every year feels like a massive change. The difference between 15 and 17 is colossal for everyone." Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.