As far as personal albums go, Lorde’s latest, titled Virgin, gets top billing. On the track Broken Glass, she sings about her struggles to move on from her eating disorder: It might be years of bad luck / But what if it’s just broken glass? Favourite Daughter takes her in a different direction as she sings: Breaking my back just to be your favourite daughter.
The 28-year-old singer unloaded her mind when she sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. On The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1, she spoke about what it feels like to be a famous musician at an early age.
It was around the time she was making the album Solar Power (2021) that the power of raw confession was unleashed. It was a time when she reassessed her career.
“I think it was sometime around the end of 2022, the start of 2023, and all these different things converged, these things that had been building, it felt like, my whole life. Definitely my whole adult life. I had this deep moment of existential reassessment of my role. I was like: ‘Why am I in this role? What is the way that I want to be in that feels right to me and healthy to me?’ Because I tried this refusal on Solar Power, and there was something missing. I felt those songs touch my skin and not hook my guts. I was like: ‘This isn’t the best use of this prime of your life that you’re in’,” she told Lowe, who has become the go-to person of the music world. Singers feel comfortable sharing insights on his popular show on Apple Music 1.
She had a problem with eating right through 2022. “I was so hungry. And I’m lucky that I was able to move through that. But it just felt like a breaking point. I remember waking up one day and being like: ‘I cannot do this anymore. I cannot go to bed thinking about everything I ate that day and waking up worrying about all the s**t I’m going to eat.’”
The Grammy winner has written and produced every song on Virgin with Jim-E Stack. Everything on the album is introspective, but there are hooks that are meant to be played in stadiums. Lorde has something new to say, and she speaks up.
As soon as her first album, Pure Heroine, appeared in 2013, fame came knocking. The New Zealand singer-songwriter was just a teenager, only 16. Overnight, she became a pop idol and it’s a status Lorde has to live up to.
“I think for a long time I’ve tried to be very binary about it. When I’m in the studio or when I’m in America, I’m an artiste. When I go home to New Zealand, I’m not an artiste and I turn that part of myself off. It’s impossible... obviously. Solar Power, I was trying to go all the way that way. I just want to be that. I don’t want to be this. Didn’t feel great. And I’ve realised now and again, this speaks to trying to find this purest version of yourself, the purest version of me is famous out in the world. It’s just that she’s maybe in a garden, experiencing ego death in the middle of the night….”
Perhaps the most difficult song on the album is Favourite Daughter: Everywhere I run, I’m always runnin’ to ya, sings Lorde.
“I feel like almost all the songs on this record, if they’re sort of aimed at a person, it’s a composite of people and moments that have kind of brought up a certain feeling for me. So that song is about my relationship with my mom, who is the reason that I do everything I do... she is the blueprint for me. But, it’s also as much as it’s about my mom when I’m saying: ‘All the medals I won for you... breaking my back to be your favourite daughter,’ I felt that I was also singing to an audience. There’s been this dynamic for the last 10-12 years, and then further back obviously of wanting so badly to be loved and to get this approval and to be the favourite. And it was really moving to me how, even as I was sort of singing through this song about my foremost idol and the person who I think is the most amazing in the world, I was also singing about kind of what a crazy thing it is to have happened to you, what had happened to me at 16,” she told Lowe.