by Marc Shapiro
The internet was suddenly bombarded with hateful tweets directed at Lorde and, in particular, James. Some, as reported in Rolling Stone and US, were as the result of Lorde’s public disregard for the boy band One Direction. But many others were particularly hateful in tone and downright racist. James comes from an Asian background.
‘What the fuck is Lorde and that Chinese sort of ostrich anyway,’ read one. ‘Girl, your boyfriend looks like Mao Tse Tung,’ read another. ‘Lorde’s boyfriend looks like the Chinese exchange student from Sixteen Candles,’ blasted another.
Lorde would recall the incident in Rookie. ‘Suddenly there were, like, hundreds of people from my city looking at my picture and making fun of me.’ The attacks would also bring back recent but bitter memories of being teased for wearing weird clothes and reading weird books.
Lorde was extremely upset by the remarks and took it upon herself to track down Grr through his Facebook account and told Grr that he was cruel to expose her to those kinds of attacks. Grr would apologise and immediately removed the photo. But he did not go quietly, telling Herald on Sunday that he had essentially done her a favour by exposing her relationship to the world.
‘If she takes everything personally, she’s going to be a wreck by the end of the year,’ he said. ‘I had to say something to her, as a warning to her, that she needed to harden up a little bit.’
Things would seem to have truly got a bit out of control when a fellow performer, Tyler: The Creator, posted an Instagram video mocking the young couple. Surprisingly Lorde’s response was that it made her laugh.
But in quieter moments she would acknowledge that while she was a celebrity, she was also quite human and hinted that the attacks on James and herself had been upsetting.
If Lorde was upset by the attacks, she tended to put her anger aside in favour of amazement and circumspect responses as she recalled in Rolling Stone.
‘That was some pretty weird shit,’ she recalled. ‘You almost wonder about humans. Walking around Auckland, it’s easy to notice that it’s a diverse city with lots of interracial relationships. That’s why the reaction came as such a surprise to me. No one I know would even think this was a big deal.’
Lorde would ultimately be proven right as, after the initial blast from the haters, the furor quite simply went away. Pictures of Lorde and James walking hand in hand and posing for funny mobile phone photos became more and more common. The pair was not hiding anything.
Quite simply they were young and in love.
And at the end of the day, he was the ideal man to support his woman. Because into September 2013, things were about to get even busier for the woman whose popularity on a worldwide scale was growing by leaps and bounds.
Which, indirectly, made Lorde and James’ life a bit more difficult as the singer lamented in a thoughtful, introspective essay that appeared in Sunday Magazine.
‘Sometimes my boyfriend and I get photographed on the street when we just want to have time that doesn’t belong to other people.’
LORDE WOULD TELL
ANY BODY WHO ASKED THAT
SHE WAS TRULY IN CONTROL
OF WHAT WAS GOING ON
IN HER CAREER.
But by September, with her music selling in the millions and her time being more and more occupied by promotion and press, even she had those moments when she felt that what she created was now not entirely her own.
‘I feel completely in control,’ she insisted in a wide-ranging interview with 3rd Degree. ‘Although even at some points people seem to be trying to get control. But at the end of the day, it’s my art and I’m in control.’
The control Lorde was speaking of may well have been the growing hype generated by an all too willing press. Superlatives were falling like rain, much of it admittedly justified. The most persistent being that Lorde was almost certainly a lock for at least four Grammy nominations at the upcoming awards program. Lorde tended to take those kinds of pronouncements with a grain of salt, pointing to her lifelong sense of perfectionism as a defence against believing her own press.
‘I feel like I constantly have to prove myself because of my age,’ she told 3rd Degree.
However, even with the ever-growing notoriety, Lorde acknowledged to Fader that she was still a bit below the radar despite the hit records, the shows and a mountain of press. ‘I’m still not like very famous and I definitely have a very private life. It’s only been six or eight months since I released The Love Club EP and since people had any idea who I was. So I’ve been able to have a fairly normal time of things.’
Proving herself at this point meant doing the business side of music and doing yet another round of promotion and a handful of concerts. A second return to the US had been scheduled to begin late in September but Lorde was taking the time to grease the wheels on her side of the Pacific as well. Her 3rd Degree interview in New Zealand would prove a straightforward and revealing look at how Lorde was dealing with the stardom.
Lorde followed with an appearance on the legendary music show Later. . . With Jools Holland. It was an all-star line-up to kick off the show’s seventeenth season that included the Kings of Leon and Lorde’s longtime idol Kanye West. The singer recalled in Rolling Stone how she was quite literally a giggling little girl upon the occasion of meeting Kanye.
‘He shook my hand and said he liked the messages in my songs,’ she related. ‘I was saying to myself “Keep cool. This is normal.”’
Sensing that ‘Royals’ and ‘Tennis Court’ had pretty much played out their potential as hit singles, Lorde announced that her third single ‘Team’ would be available on September 13. Although the song was part of the Pure Heroine album, it became evident that this was Lorde, lyrically and emotionally, growing a bit older.
A haunting hybrid of pop, rock and electro pop, the song is also forthright in taking on the notion of teen rebellion, how important it ultimately is and how we all, at some point, must get on with our lives. It was a by-product of Lorde’s sudden introduction to a much bigger world and an encouraging sign that Lorde could effectively grow with her sound and attitude.
The ‘Team’ video, directed by Alex Takacs aka Young Replicant, was, by comparison to the previous two videos, a much more ambitious and literal Lord of the Flies story in which a young boy travels to an island populated by teens and partakes in various tests to determine if he is worthy of joining them. From its inception, the ‘Team’ video carried the banner of art and alienation. Although Young Replicant was more than capable of directing the proceedings, it was an unwritten role that Lorde, for everything from the casting of ‘different looking’ teens to the visual style, had the final say so. The director admitted to MTV that the singer and he went back and forth on various elements of the shoot before Lorde ultimately got her way.
The headstrong singer would insist that Lorde’s rule was law in an MTV feature. ‘Basically everything that I put out that has my name on it is controlled by me. I have a very strong visual identity. I know how I want stuff to look. I’m almost too involved.’
Lorde flew back to the States at the end of September to begin her second US trek. The first stop was the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show. Viewers were expecting yet another rendition of ‘Royals’, which they got. But what came as a surprise was an encore of the haunting and poignant ‘White Teeth Teens’ off the Pure Heroine album.
The song was not considered a candidate for singles stardom and so not necessarily something to be showcased on US television. But Lorde wanted to do it, so who was to argue? There was another quick stop on The Ellen Show and another round of ‘Royals’ before Lorde would once again put her talent to the test in another concert setting.
The Warsaw Theater in Brooklyn, New York, had been considered a bastion for Polish culture. That Lorde would headline a concert there was not lost on the singer who, according to a Complex review, turned to the sold-out audience at one point and acknowledged, ‘This is really weird.’ In reality what the show would turn out
to be was a barometer of where Lorde was in the pop music world.
The concert showcased the singer as a first rate performer who had long since got her stage legs and was presenting her persona in a well-defined manner. And, as with all performers who have ‘arrived’ in such a spectacular manner, the question remained. What was next?
That’s when Hollywood came calling. The Hunger Games film series was already considered a blockbuster movie franchise and the bottom-line people felt that there was no better way to increase the Hunger Games: Catching Fire prospects than with an all-star soundtrack by a wildly divergent line-up of current pop stars. Lorde immediately came to mind, as did the potential of a cover of the Tears for Fears classic ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’. Lorde readily accepted the offer, feeling there was something she could do with the song that would make it different. And in her hands, the classic piece of pop history suddenly became very much her own, an extremely brooding and dirge-like call to war that fit perfectly into her realm of contemplative music. The feeling was that Lorde would most likely include the reworked chestnut on an upcoming album.
Lorde hopscotched back across the Pacific to keep a long held promise. Australia had been particularly supportive early on and had, for a long time, been begging for a live show. Lorde went that request one better when she scheduled four shows between October 16 and 21 in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne in conjunction with the release of Pure Heroine in the country.
The shows were highly successful on all fronts. The shows were also conspicuous by the question most often asked by audience members, who seemed amazed that a girl so young could be such a talented and polished performer.
Just before beginning her Australian mini-tour, Lorde and Joel received a very special local honour when 10,000 New Zealand songwriters, members of the Australasian Performing Right Association, voted the pair the coveted APRA Silver Scroll Award for ‘Royals’. This was a pivotal moment for Lorde as it was the first award she received for creativity rather than sales.
As reported by The Music Network, the pair shared a humorous and emotional moment on stage when Joel turned to Lorde and said, ‘It’s taken me ten years to get up on this stage and it’s taken you ten months. You’re so annoying. The scary part is that you definitely haven’t written your best song yet.’
Lorde returned to New Zealand, where the days leading up to her seventeenth birthday were filled with preparations for upcoming tours as well as the occasional very quick foray into the studio.
The woman would prove particularly astute when it came to merchandising her name. She definitely had opinions about what posters should look like and what kind of illustrations should appear on T-shirts and other clothing. Like everything else in her worldview, even the more crass commercial world would fall to her artistic visions.
This all spells money for Lorde, as does just about everything she has done over the past year, and change. But suddenly having more money than she’s ever dreamed of having, with more on the way, has been somewhat daunting for the singer. With her finances being watched over by her father, Lorde has still had more money to play around with.
BUT SHE HAS BEEN SLOW TO COME
OUT OF HER FRUGAL SHELL.
She has regularly said that even a purchase of $200 gives her pause and that she is not the type to blow her money on big cars and houses, but would rather buy geeky things like first edition books and old records. And she just shrugs and smiles when reporters indicate that she is most likely already worth several million dollars at the ripe old age of seventeen. That did not mean as much to her as the idea that the money had truly been the result of her creativity and passion.
Lorde flew back to the US in early November for another round of promotion. A particular stop on the nighttime talk show The Late Show with David Letterman cemented her celebrity in America. Rather than do ‘Royals’ again, Lorde indicated that she was already moving past the song when she chose to do her most recent single ‘Team’ instead. But those who tuned into the show’s webcast Live with David Letterman were happily surprised when the singer trotted out a veritable mini-concert that included not only ‘Royals’ and the aforementioned ‘Team’, but the songs ‘Bravado’, ‘Tennis Court’, ‘Buzzcut Season’, ‘Ribs’ and ‘White Teeth Teens’.
Now more familiar with New York and its vibe, Lorde would spend the next few days in the Big Apple, celebrating her seventeenth birthday on November 7, amid family, friends and good cheer.
High on her list of memorable moments turning seventeen was the invitation to perform at the Museum of Modern Art Film Benefit. It was a moment that she would be reluctant to talk about because it was just too personal to her. But she would offer to New Zealand Listener that the night was a truly existential experience. ‘Performing at MOMA? That was just one of those moments in your life. It was like “What am I doing here? How am I on this path?” It was just so incredible that I was jealous of myself.’
She would do a high-powered rendition of ‘Royals’ in front of a celebrity crowd that included benefit honoree actress Tilda Swinton, legendary musician David Bowie, Ralph Fiennes, Drew Barrymore and designer Karl Lagerfeld. But for the pure fan, the meeting of Swinton and Bowie were the high points of the evening.
Lorde tweeted of the meeting with the actress, ‘I performed at the MOMA benefit honouring Tilda Swinton. Such an honor. That woman is phenomenal, a true heroine.’
In conversation with Bowie she had to fight real hard against turning into a crazed fan. Initially Lorde had been reluctant to make this very personal moment public but eventually she relented in a conversation with Rookie.
‘We were holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes and talking. It was insane. A beautiful moment. To have somebody like David Bowie tell you that listening to you was like listening to tomorrow . . . It was like I could creatively die and be happy forever.’
Also in town at the time was prize-winning New Zealand author Eleanor Catton. Lorde’s mother had arranged for the two Kiwis to meet and they spent a good part of the night reminiscing and just talking as only two celebrated New Zealanders can.
However, it wasn’t all celebrity and glitz that night. Lorde wound down that evening with a rousing game of bowling at a local Brooklyn alley. There was also a small moment as she was being driven back to her hotel in a taxi that she related in a tweet, ‘I was in a cab going home in New York City and ‘Royals’ came on the drivers’ radio and I laughed. The driver asked why and I told him it was my song and he said “mine too”.’
LORDE WOKE UP FROM HER
AMAZING NIGHT TO YET ANOTHER
PRESENT. ‘ROYALS’ HAD BEEN
CONFIRMED NO. 1 ON THE
BILLBOARD US CHARTS FOR
THE SIXTH WEEK IN A ROW.
This being her first birthday away from home, and acknowledging that a lot had happened in her life in the past year, Lorde poured out her feelings and emotions on turning seventeen and suddenly being a star in a Tumblr letter that would also find a home in Sunday Magazine.
‘I think back to my last birthday and how it fell in the middle of exam revision but a bunch of my friends came over anyway to eat cake and ruffle my hair and to talk about Pokémon (a game). Weirdos. Miss them and my family terribly. But I have kind of a family here in New York. Our little tight bunch playing shows and being overwhelmed constantly and falling asleep in the backs of cabs.’
During her time in New York, Lorde would also make a November 11 appearance at the VH-1 You Oughta Know Concert at the Roseland Ballroom, a showcase of up-and-coming new talent. Yet another sign that the singer had, in the minds of those who dictated hip, arrived.
But it remained for her birthday present, on November 7, to put the capper on any notion that Lorde was not the real thing. Lorde signed a music publishing deal with Songs Music Publishing for a reported $2.5 million. The worldwide deal, according to Billboard, would include rights to The Love Club EP, Pure Heroine and all future recordings. It would also o
pen up opportunities for Lorde to collaborate with other artists and write songs specifically for other people.
The competition for Lorde’s publishing turned out to be a yearlong process in which more than half a dozen of the biggest music publishing houses engaged in a heated bidding war for her music rights.
Lorde’s manager recalled in a wide-ranging Stuff interview that he was ‘essentially spinning plates’ during the year-long courtship of his client. He related that things got so heated that one suitor offered him the use of a private jet to go to meetings. And then, he recalled, there was the money being tossed around.
‘She’s been offered ridiculous amounts of money,’ related Maclachlan. ‘It would have been handy (for me) to commission on. But I want to be working with Ella for the next twenty years. I don’t want her to turn around in two years and say, “You took me for everything you could.”’
Not that Lorde and large amounts of money were strangers. It was a well-known fact that long before the singer signed on for the multi-million-dollar publishing deal she had already made a considerable amount of money. That she had it and was not spotted buying big cars and houses was in stark contrast to the antics of other very young and very wealthy celebrities who seemed hell-bent on spending it faster than they made it.
Lorde would often get the money question and, as in the case of an interview with the Today Show, she was humble and straightforward in discussing it.
‘All my money goes into a trust and I can’t just take it out and spend it willy nilly,’ she said. ‘My dad has to okay it. I don’t know if I would know how to live in a hugely extravagant way.’
Songs head of A&R Ron Perry recalled in Billboard how the year-long chase after Lorde began. ‘My A&R guy, Corey Roberts, picked up on her in January and sent me an email that said, “Stop what you’re doing.” That was pretty ballsy considering he had only started working for us six weeks earlier. But I did. I flipped out right away.’