Lorde Your Heroine

by Marc Shapiro

  However Louis and Ella were typical twelve year olds of any persuasion and the ongoing conflict seemed to be the difference in their maturity level. Ella was a mature twelve-year-old and Louis was not.

  On those occasions when they would be approached by even the most softball level local media, Ella was distinct, no-nonsense and to the point in dealing with the press. On the other hand, Louis was your typical twelve-year-old whose responses were often disjointed and stumbling. He made it plain that he was an amateur and that drove the perfectionist in Ella crazy. During their time together, she would regularly admonish him for not being more professional.

  Louis and Ella’s short stint as local celebrities might have been the end of Ella’s musical career. While supportive of their daughter’s efforts and talent, Victor and Sonja had a much more academic future in mind for their daughter.

  Fortunately Louis’s father had other ideas.

  Ian McDonald had the makings of the classic stage father. He was well aware that pre-teen and teen performers were being plucked from obscurity and into stardom on a near daily basis and felt his son was talented enough to be the next big thing. His drive to do something about it was encouraged when he read a newspaper interview with Universal Music Group A&R representative in New Zealand Scott Maclachlan that indicated he was always looking for new artists and would gladly listen to submissions.

  McDonald soon saw his opportunity when Louis and Ella were scheduled to appear at their school’s talent show entitled Belmont Idol. McDonald videotaped the duo’s two song performance of Duffy’s ‘Warwick Avenue’ and Pixie Lott’s ‘Mama Do’. For observers of that contest, it was vintage Ella, alternately a world-weary chanteuse and soulful introspective pop belter who, when she did move, presented an image far removed from normal stage performances. It was a safe bet that while Ella was not taking it all too seriously, deep down in her psyche, something was taking a much deeper look. It came as no surprise that Louis and Ella were the hands-down winner of Belmont Idol.

  Ella did not think too much about it. ‘It was my intermediate school talent show,’ she offered to MTV. ‘It was all very low key.’

  But McDonald only saw a bright future for his son and was quick to make copies of the performance and send them out to a number of talent agents, with Maclachlan at the top of the list.

  In fact he was so intent on spreading the word that he neglected to ask Ella’s parent’s permission. When Victor and Sonja found out what MacDonald had done, they were understandably irate.

  ‘I was really unhappy about it,’ Sonja recalled in a conversation with Faster/Louder. ‘I was pissed off. I would never have chosen that for Ella. Not at twelve.’

  Ella was not as angry as her mother but she was easily more perplexed at being unexpectedly dangled out there for the pop music business to consider. ‘It was strange to launch myself into the spotlight this way,’ she told The Daily Telegraph. ‘I had always been the shy, bookish girl.’

  Maclachlan had his own measure of success before migrating to New Zealand. He prided himself on knowing what the pop business had become and how to channel and mould raw talent into stardom. And one look at the grainy Belmont Idol footage told him exactly how he would handle Ella if he decided to take her under his wing.

  ‘The thing that really attracted me to her was her incredible voice,’ he assessed in a HitQuarters interview. He added to his early assessment of Ella’s talents when he told Rolling Stone, ‘Her voice had great depth and timbre. There was real soul to it.’

  Despite the normal parental reservations, Victor and Sonja made no bones about the fact that they were excited by the unexpected possibilities that could await their daughter in a music career. They knew enough about how the pop music industry worked. A lot of it was ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ but, in the interim, a lot of money could be made that could set their daughter up quite comfortably as she contemplated her future.

  And so when Maclachlan contacted Sonja and suggested they meet at a local café, they readily agreed and met shortly thereafter for an informal sit-down to discuss a possible career for their twelve-year-old daughter.

  Mother and daughter had no idea what to expect. Maclachlan did have some ideas.

  Maclachlan was already mulling over the idea of putting Ella in the studio with a reliable pop music writer to put out some commercial, radio-friendly hits to put Ella on the map. If that did not work, there was always what he considered the standby of doing some covers of ’60s chestnuts done up with Ella’s soulful vocals. Quite simply, that was the way it had been done and the results spoke for themselves. It worked real well and that’s what Maclachlan wanted for Ella.

  But his initial impression of Ella as yet another pop puppet on a string was changed once he met her.

  Maclachlan immediately ‘saw her as a perfect storm of a lot of things,’ he recalled to 3rd Degree. ‘Intelligence, charisma, vocals, ability, confidence, humility. She was every box you can tick for an A&R guy.’

  Those initial impressions of Lorde made it difficult for him to see her being put into a pre fab musical box.

  ‘When I met her, I thought she was just this incredibly intelligent person,’ he told HitQuarters. ‘It’s hard for a twelve-year-old to know what they really want to do and so we basically just kept up a conversation and I made some suggestions of how we might get some music together.’

  There had been an immediate meeting of the minds. Ella felt she could trust this much older person and Maclachlan had made a mental note to go with his young charge’s every wish. Because he knew in his gut that Ella knew what she wanted and would not back down.

  For her part, Ella was immediately at a loss as to how that initial meeting went as she related to 3rd Degree. ‘At that time, I really didn’t feel that I gave Scott much to go on. I had a voice but I wasn’t writing my own songs.’

  Despite Ella’s initial concerns, that first meeting went well and there was discussion of Ella initially being signed to a development deal with Universal Music Group. But before that could happen, Maclachlan and she would have to get on the same page musically.

  Early on, the A&R man seemed subtly intent on getting his way and offered the youngster a CD of classic ’60s music as a gentle prod in his direction. It was at that point that Maclachlan found out just how determined Ella was to do this her own way when, shortly after receiving the CD, she tossed it in the bin. Ella was not interested in singing cover songs.

  ‘I don’t know what he [Maclachlan] was thinking,’ Lorde related to 3rd Degree. ‘But I knew that was not what I was going to be doing. I wanted to do my own thing.’

  With the arrangement done, Ella would get her first glimpses of what the music business was like. Maclachlan would take Ella around to meetings with representatives of Universal Music Group, the expected meet-and-greets and introductory get-togethers between the executive branch and their new creative discovery. Ella would relate in a News.com.au interview that those she met within those days could be conspicuous by their condescending attitude toward her; as was the case when one record company person called her ‘a spreadsheet with hair’ while well within Ella’s earshot.

  ‘People would talk to my manager instead of me,’ she recalled. ‘This would usually last for about ten minutes until I would insert the kind of dry sentence that would make most adults splutter and blush and reach for their water. After that, they would start taking me seriously.’

  Rather than kick this headstrong pre-teen to the curb, Universal Music Group, surprisingly, took her at her word and, at least for the time being, left her alone to do her thing.

  ‘They were pretty open-minded about it,’ Lorde told The Guardian. ‘They got straight away that I was a bit weird, and that I would not be doing anything I didn’t want to do. And so they completely went with that.’

  But there was a price to be paid.

  ELLA KNEW THAT WOULD

  MEAN SHE WOULD HAVE TO BEGIN

  WRITING HER OWN SONGS.

&n
bsp; MACLACHLAN SIGNED

  ELLA TO A DEVELOPMENT

  DEAL WITH UNIVERSAL

  MUSIC GROUP MIDWAY

  THROUGH 2009.

  To his way of thinking it was the ideal way to go. Rather than rush her into the studio for a quick strike of songs written by other people or safe commercial covers, Maclachlan instinctively found that Ella was a work in progress, and a headstrong one at that.

  He could not force Ella, who he acknowledged was wise and mature beyond her years, to do something and have it be successful. And despite her obvious talent, she was still raw and needed some work. A development deal did not require a large expenditure of money and there were no deadlines to meet and so it seemed like the ideal way to go. Which was fine with Ella, who had an immediate trust in Maclachlan that he would indeed listen to her as an equal and not a child and, more importantly, that he would do everything possible to have her career go the way she wanted.

  The first order of business was to hook Ella up with veteran singing coach Francis Dickinson, who would meet with Ella twice a week to work on the tonal quality of her voice and to bring her nasal quality and lower range singing voice up to levels that were pop-music friendly. Ella would recall in Vogue that the voice lessons immediately put her in a different frame of mind.

  ‘It wasn’t until I had vocal lessons that singing really became kind of a tool and something I could use to get across what I was feeling. Before then the things that I had taught myself to do with my throat were instinctive and stuff that I was mimicking from things that I had heard.’

  In the meantime, Maclachlan was beating the bushes for the best songwriters he could find to work with Ella on crafting her music. He knew this was going to be a difficult process.

  Ella had gone into this collaborative songwriting idea grudgingly with her sole caveat being that any songwriter she worked with had to be female. From his perspective, Maclachlan knew that the prospect of established and much older songwriters working with a headstrong singer with zero experience but definite opinions could try everybody’s patience.

  This period was trial by fire in the classic sense, fuelled largely by Ella’s admitted insecurities with the songwriting process as she explained to Rookie Magazine.

  ‘As a young songwriter, I would put a lot of pressure on myself. I’d write a line and then aggressively backspace because I was like “This isn’t a representation of you”. Or “This is weird”. I would just censor myself so heavily. I felt like there wasn’t room for me to write a bad song or write something that didn’t necessarily fit in with my vibe or whatever.’

  Ella’s budding musical attitudes were fuelled by a growing infatuation with edgier, rather than predictable, pop music. As she would explain to Red Bull Music, she was particularly fond of the group Animal Collective. ‘I was probably twelve or thirteen years old when I really began to discover music. One of the first bands I really liked was Animal Collective. Animal Collective made pop music but in a way that was new, strange and different.’

  Lorde would later jokingly recall to Spotify that Animal Collective also shot to the top of her hit list for another reason. ‘I remember thinking “Dad hates it! This is fantastic!”’

  Between 2009 and 2011, Ella would work with no less than half-a-dozen big names in the songwriting business that had a solid track record for writing hits for other people. The list of those who would attempt to work with Ella included Dianne Swann, Rikki Morris, Karl Steven and Boh Runga. The results of this two-year experiment were abject failure.

  If one is to believe the stories from that period, there was little if any chemistry between Ella and these seasoned pros. Reportedly little, if any, writing was being done and no actual songs of any quality were actually completed. And truth be known, the lack of progress was very much in Ella’s court.

  Ella had it in her head that she was not going to like the experience and that attitude was a classic example of wish fulfillment. In later years, she would complain of that period that she never felt like she was completing anything worthwhile and would acknowledge in a Faster/Louder piece that, ‘It was incredibly uncomfortable and stressful.’

  A major element in the failure of collaboration was the surfacing of her pure artistic instincts that often ran counter to the more commercially oriented attitudes of her collaborators. Lorde admitted as much in conversation with Red Bull Music. ‘I don’t just fool around. I’m a control freak. I want my music to sound 100 percent the way I want it to, I try to create art that means something to me.’

  Maclachlan had a ringside seat for the ongoing writer’s block as he offered in an interview with HitQuarters. ‘I put her in with some songwriters and, by trial and error, we went through a few people but it didn’t really work. I think she understood that she was going to have to write her own songs.’

  This two-year drought would have a silver lining. Ella turned thirteen in 2010 and decided it was finally time to try and write her own songs. Not surprisingly, her first efforts were drawn from her everyday life as well as literary and pop culture reference points. A perfect example being the very first song she ever wrote, a dark little ditty called ‘Dope Ghost’.

  ‘My first song was called “Dope Ghost”,’ she reported to MTV. ‘I had just watched the Larry Clark movie Kids and I thought it was rad. I think it [the song] was poking fun at this girl in my year [class] who was kind of going off the rails.’

  ‘It was a diss track,’ she would relate to Spotify. ‘I wasn’t happy that she was letting down our group that way. I also wrote a song about how I had slipped on some rocks in winter and almost drowned. Those early songs were often these strange melodramatic pieces. But then I was only thirteen.’

  During those early songwriting efforts, Ella was extremely secretive and, perhaps, just a bit embarrassed at her efforts. She grudgingly let her parents in on what she was doing. And that may have been a mistake, as her friend Madeline Christy said to 3 News. ‘Her mum was the one who told me, “You’ve got to listen to her songs.” I wanted to listen to her work for ages and Ella just wouldn’t let her [mum] play it. She would just cover the computer. She was really embarrassed about it I guess.’

  While Maclachlan continued to express frustration at the revolving door nature of songwriters failing to cut it with Ella, he was now faced with a whole new set of challenges now that Ella was striking out on her own.

  Maclachlan recalled in HitQuarters that it was a nurturing process centred around Ella finding herself as a songwriter. He was encouraged by the fact that the youngster’s earliest songwriting efforts – yes, even ‘Dope Ghost’ – had shown some promise.

  ‘It was really all about feedback and making practical suggestions about arrangements, melodies and stuff like that,’ he related.

  The explanation sounded simple enough but, as it would play out in the ensuing months, it was a lot of back and forth between the two. Ella would bring Maclachlan something she had been working on and he would make comments that she would take into consideration or completely discount. Then she would go away and, sometimes as many as three months later, she would come back with something else that, to her mentor’s delight, always seemed to be an improvement.

  Going into late 2011, Ella was still in a state of slow but steady development. Her songwriting skills were getting sharper but Maclachlan was still adamant that she needed an experienced guiding hand to add some elements of musical and production direction to her raw but promising talents.

  By this time, Ella had matriculated to Takapuna Grammar and had fallen in with a much hipper crowd who, upon hearing about Ella’s entry into the pop music scene, were very supportive and, yes, occasionally teasing. Ella had the cool factor on her side at this point but it was, in the eyes of her tight circle of friends, only a facet of her personality, and they were quick to treat her just like a regular person.

  It also helped the socialisation process that Ella’s parents insisted that she continue to attend public school and that, while she
would sometimes miss days because of her music career, she would never fall behind in class and would continue to shine at the head of her class.

  When it came to her home life, Ella’s parents made sure she was grounded. The chores she had before she suddenly became a budding pop star were still there and she was expected to do them. And that did not stop at doing the dishes and taking out the garbage. When Sonja was putting the finishing touches on her long-in-the-works master’s thesis, she turned to her daughter to do the final edit. Long story short, Ella made short, accurate work of her mother’s 40,000 word thesis. Sonja got an A.

  It went without saying that Ella’s critical eye when it came to things like school essays and term papers also made the rounds of her classmates who would regularly enlist her to go over their work. That would ultimately backfire when she would complain that what they had done was not perfect and could be better. ‘I became very particular,’ she told The Wall Street Journal.

  The last few months of 2011 were a blur. The constant challenges of trying to get a foothold in the music business had, to a large extent, turned into an actual job, resplendent in failed writing attempts and collaborations that were seemingly going nowhere. But Ella maintained a stalwart stance, conceding that the pop music scene, flavours of the moment to the contrary, could take some time, especially when, by design, she seemed a lot more driven and different then the hit makers of the day.

  November marked her fifteenth birthday and it passed with little, if any, high points other than that she had become a girl of a certain age. She was happy to be with family and friends and seemed satisfied with that gift. What Ella did not know was that a more tangible gift was just around the corner.