How Lorde Broke All the Rules
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This story was originally published in the January 30, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
A lamp or a bowl? Ella Yelich-O’Connor wants to buy a Christmas present for her manager, which is why she’s standing, with a puzzled look, in a chic design store in Herne Bay, an Auckland, New Zealand, suburb that smells like affluence and the ocean. They’re both great gifts, but Ella is determined to figure out which one is better. The choices: a hand-shaped brass bowl with a glowing gold wash, or a minimalist globe table lamp with no base. “Taylor’s supergood at this stuff,” says Ella, who’s wearing light-gray trousers and a slightly-less-gray shirt. “She’s decorated her own houses for ages.” So why not text photos of both gifts to her? “That’s a great idea.” Her friend Taylor Swift is in London, where it’s almost midnight, and doesn’t reply immediately, so after more furrowed deliberation, Ella chooses the bowl.
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Outside, at a cafe on Jervois Road, we’re interrupted approximately every six minutes by autograph and photo requests from polite New Zealanders enjoying the summer weather. A bus of school kids in red blazers pauses at a stoplight, and when the kids spot Ella, they wave in unison delight.
In “Royals,” her worldwide smash, Ella mocks the fatuousness of pop stars who brag about driving Maybachs and drinking Cristal, and she also brazenly offers to replace the idiots who dominate Top 40: “You can call me Queen Bee, and baby, I’ll rule,” she sings. Big talk for a teenage nobody from nowhere.
“I’ve always been into the idea of confidence. Like, I called my record Pure Heroine.” She laughs. “Even my stage name is kind of cocky or grandiose.” She mentions a lyric from Kanye West’s “Dark Fantasy” (“Me found bravery in my bravado”), which gave her courage to announce her ambition in “Royals.” “I get paralyzingly nervous a lot of times, so I tried bravado. The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it strange or intimidating. I think my whole career can be boiled down to the one word I always say in meetings: strength.”
Now, at 17, she is the Queen Bee, with four Grammy nominations and well-deserved acclaim for her smart and unique album. On the day in October when “Royals” went to Number One — displacing Miley Cyrus, symbolism that’s hard to miss — Ella had a photo shoot in New York. “The photographer kept saying, ‘Pop your hip out. Try to look cute. Big smiles, now.’ And I was like, ‘I’m Number One in this country not because I flirt and wink and all that shit, but because I’ve done exactly what I want to do.’ So, no, he did not get smiles.” And then she smiles.
Her phone dings. It’s a reply from Swift. “Oh, shit. She wrote, ‘I love the lamp.’ Noooo!”
Eleven different songs went to Number One in 2013, but none took as crooked a path as “Royals,” which defied the stodgy, failing, decades-old model of how music is made and marketed. Hits always inspire imitations, but Lorde’s combination of chance, accident and latent talent can’t be duplicated.
She recorded Pure Heroine in New Zealand — a country known mostly for providing the ancient scenery of Tolkien movies — writing with producer Joel Little, whose meager renown came from his stint as the singer in Goodnight Nurse, the Kiwi band that sounded most like Green Day. Ella and Little — “just these two random losers,” in her words — worked without interference in his plain studio next to Eastwood Tyres in Morningside, an industrial section of Auckland. Every time a truck passed by they had to stop recording vocals. They created an album of poised songs about teenage life; not only the cliques and the boredom, but the specific emotional patterns of Ella’s generation (“It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care”).
When her New Zealand label heard the songs, they shrugged. So late in 2012, she uploaded five of them as a free download on SoundCloud, named the set The Love Club EP, and watched it ripple: downloads, blog comments and endorsements from hitmakers (Dr. Luke), cool kids (Grimes) and hitmaking cool kids (Diplo). Russell Crowe and Karl Lagerfeld — pretty much polar opposites of each other — declared their fealty. Just two months after “Royals” debuted on Spotify, it topped the service’s Viral Chart, which measures the ratio between shares and streams. Her record label, and even pop-radio stations, had no choice but to jump on the rear of the bandwagon.
“I thought it would be this cool thing on SoundCloud, but it ended up being this cool thing on iTunes. And Spotify. And YouTube. And Top 40 radio,” she says. “Everyone talks about Ella as the anti-Miley because she dresses like a witch and she doesn’t twerk,” says Tavi Gevinson, the 17-year-old founder and editor-in-chief of Rookiemag.com, the definitive website for self-aware teen girls. “But it’s more nuanced than that. She’s not entirely a ‘good girl,’ so to speak. She sings about partying, she curses like a sailor and her songs aren’t completely asexual. There’s a lot of teen rebel in her. People say, ‘Oh, she’s the patron saint of the weird girls.’ No, a lot of people identify with her, not just weirdos, and that’s why she’s a pop star. She reflects an intelligence in girls our age, and normalizes it. I’m so happy she exists.”
Ella uses her Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram to share opinions and fears. She’s tweeted about an acne outbreak, about the dread of homework, about having $26 in the bank (that was a while ago, obviously), about her unashamed love of Phil Collins. In interviews, she has declared herself a feminist, denounced the passive theme of Selena Gomez’s “Come & Get It” as anti-feminist and talked about great writers — Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath — in a way that showed she’d read and understood them. As the music spread, fans learned she was stubborn, determined and outspoken — a teen with teeth.
Inevitably, there was a backlash. “People don’t like girls who don’t smile,” she says with a shrug. With her superhighway of dark curls, gray-to-black palette of clothes and dark-plum lipstick, she’s easy to mock: a grumpy, grouchy goth know-it-all, part Zooey Glass and part Wednesday Addams. If Lorde-is-miserable-and-hates-everything isn’t a recurring gag on this season of Saturday Night Live, shame on them.
Those who live by the Internet also die by the Internet. In November, a friend of a friend photographed Lorde at her local beach, in a bikini, her arms around boyfriend James Lowe, whose family is Chinese, and the picture spread from Facebook and Tumblr to blogs and celebrity sites. “When I heard about the photos, I was like, ‘Now there will be a bunch of people on the Internet talking about what my ass looks like.”
The minor gossip: Lorde’s boyfriend is seven years older. “I didn’t say, ‘Yeah, sure, go date a 24-year-old,” her mom, Sonja Yelich, tells me. “But her dad and I met James and we liked him. When Ella was much younger, her first boyfriend was older — four years or something.” Given her maturity, it would be a bigger surprise if Ella dated someone who wasn’t older. And if Justin Bieber had dated a 24-year-old when he was 17, people would’ve smirked and high-fived him.
When the photo emerged, bullies and racists on Twitter were overjoyed. Comments included, “Lorde’s boyfriend looks like the Chinese exchange student from sixteen candles” and “Girl, your boyfriend looks like Mao Tse Tung.” “Some pretty nasty shit,” she says. “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.”
Many of the comments came from vengeful One Direction fans, who believed, wrongly, that Lorde had called the group “ugly.” But because she’d already made critical comments about Gomez, producer David Guetta (“so gross”) and Taylor Swift, prior to the start of their friendship, the rumor seemed plausible. “People around me, who I’m really close to, were like, ‘Do you have to express your opinions all the time?” She doesn’t regret anything she said — “I knew I was right” — and also knows she’s popular in part because other people her age feel similarly disgusted by pop music. She’s not “hating,” she’s critiquing, a significant difference. In a way, she’s become the most famous cultural commentator in the world, Judith Butler in Doc Martens, with a Tumblr.
She recites a few of the insults she sees most often on her Instagram: “Why are all your friends Chinese?” “Why don’t you smile?” “You look old.” “You dress like a grandmother.” After 15 years of blond, pliable Disney music stars, she’s way more Juno MacGuff than Cher Horowitz. But Ella predicts teen culture will trend her way: “On Tumblr, everyone has dark lips, and people dress the way I dress. My look is becoming more mainstream.”
A skinny guy with glasses interrupts our conversation. “Sorry, my girlfriend told me to get a picture with you.” Ella stands to take a photo with him, gestures at a waiter standing nearby, and asks, “Is this your girlfriend?”
Skinny Guy looks puzzled, and as crickets chirp, Ella apologizes to him twice. “I’m a freak,” she says, after he’s left with his photo. “This is why I should not be a famous person — I say stuff like that.”
Ella’s parents could not be less surprised by her success. “This is not the first time people have told us Ella is a genius,” says her mother during our six-hour sightseeing drive around Auckland. “Ever since she was three, teachers said that.”
Sonja Yelich is an acclaimed poet who won a New Zealand national prize for best first book of poetry, in 2005. She frequently accompanies Ella on tour, and despite knowing her daughter’s maturity, still worries: “I don’t want her to be looking like Lindsay Lohan.” Sonja’s recent passion is collecting roadkill and photographing it, after removing the limbs. (The photos are sensual and gorgeous, in a macabre way.) Her talkative and vivacious vitality encompasses a dark sense of humor.
Sonja, husband Vic O’Connor, and their four kids (all born at home) live in Devonport, a prosperous waterfront village with white-sand beaches and a hippie vibe. Although people assume Mom is Ella’s role model, she’s more like her father, a measured and disciplined civil engineer. Family dinners double as profane salons, with teasing, shouting and clashing opinions about art and politics. Sonja: “We’re just loud. We’re really loud. We’re so loud.”
Sonja had unconventional ideas about parenting. “I was always pulling the kids out of school to go places. I wanted to tip stuff into them: art galleries, literature, films with subtitles.” By the time she was 12, Ella had read more than 1,000 books, and was an academic prodigy who’d led her school team to second place in the world final of the Kids’ Lit Quiz in South Africa.
Among many prizes at school, she also won a singing contest with her version of Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue,” accompanied by a classmate, Louis McDonald, whose dad began aggressively sending their music to local big shots, including Scott Maclachlan, the head ofA&R at Universal Music New Zealand.
Maclachlan loved Ella’s voice, and he decided to “carve her off” the duo she was in. As head of A&R at Jive Records in London, he’d been mentored by Clive Calder, the executive who plotted the careers of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync. A tall, polished pit bull with a Morrissey haircut and a tart tongue (when British pop star Cher Lloyd dissed Lorde, Maclachlan called her a “talentless twat” on Twitter), Maclachlan signed Ella to a low-cost development deal and imagined a typical record-label scheme; she’d sing some soul classics, and he’d transform her into a tween Joss Stone.
But Ella refused to follow the scheme. Maclachlan persisted with a standard A&R approach, pairing her with songwriters of local renown, but the results were negligible. Three years into the deal, they were nowhere. The idea of a music career could have floated away. Which might have been fine with Sonja, who’d been opposed to Ella signing a record deal, “because I saw big things for her in some university.”
We’ve been driving for a while in Sonja’s brown Peugeot, trying and failing to find Mount Eden, a dormant volcano. She suggests we play a trick on Ella, by pretending our interview has erupted into a fight. She dictates two e-mails for me to send Ella (“Your mom seems a little upset with me,” followed by “Is she usually this sensitive?”), then tells Ella that I’m rude and have been asking inappropriate questions.
Ella e-mails me back: “WHAT IS GOING ON I HOPE THIS IS A JOKE.” We freeze her with silence, until Sonja’s cellphone rings, and Ella hears us cackling. “Oh, my God, I was so freaked out! Mom, your Christmas presents are being destroyed as we speak.”
“Oh, no!” Sonja says. “I love you.”
If Scott Maclachlan hadn’t married a New Zealander and left London, or if Louis McDonald’s father hadn’t had big ambitions for his son, there would be no Lorde. But two other events, even more unforeseen, also had to follow; Ella, a novice, turned out to be a great songwriter, and she found a sympathetic collaborator in Joel Little.
That, too, was fortuity. A local manager named Ashley Page, who’d heard Ella sing, noodged Maclachlan frequently, over a period of two years, offering Little, his client, as a collaborator. Ella preferred a female writer, and Little, a tattooed ex-punk, was skeptical about working with a girl half his age.
In a high school full of One Direction fans, Ella was unusual for, among other things, her musical passions: Kanye, Drake, Majical Cloudz, Animal Collective, Yeasayer and Grizzly Bear. She may as well have lived in Brooklyn and had a beard. After Maclachlan checked out Little — “He came in and made sure I wasn’t, like, a total creep” — the two started talking in his studio. She taught him about current electronic music (James Blake, Burial), and he tutored her in Eighties blockbusters: Prince, Michael Jackson.
Though Little might have still been wary of Ella — “this weird kid who would wear nighties to the studio and make up strange words,” she’s said — he helped her turn a spew of lyrics into melodies, and to separate verses from choruses. He also created a unique digital sound for her: spare and clipped, influenced by dub-step and hip-hop, and carefully detailed with tuned drum accents. “I can get pretty obsessed with, you know, panning high-hats,” Little says with a self-conscious smile, sitting in his studio, where an empty bottle of Cristal on a side table sits as a souvenir of the party he threw when “Royals” went to Number One. Thin and scruffy, he seems to know how unlikely a “star producer” he is. “We were just having a good time, making stuff we thought was cool. Did I think ‘Royals’ would be a global hit? Fuck, no.”
Maclachlan took “Royals” to the promotion department, who told him radio would never play the song. “And if you don’t have radio support, you’re fucked,” he says. “That’s the problem with record companies. So either we had to go on bended knee and try to convince them, or fuck it, we put it out for free. Ella and I both have a punk attitude.” (He recently left Universal to work full-time as Lorde’s manager.)
Even as “Royals” was conquering the charts, Lorde hewed to her own path. The label wanted her to make a lyric video. “I was like, ‘We’re not doing that. No. None of the musicians I like make lyric videos.”
Instead, she conceived the “Royals” video as a reflection on teen boredom, using friends from Auckland instead of actors, and appeared in it only briefly. When the U.S. label saw the clip, “they fucking hated it,” Maclachlan recalls. “They said, `She’s only in it for 10 seconds.’ I was like, `That’s the genius of it!”
Label executives who specialize in social-media marketing told Ella to use a lot of hashtags and hype her music to followers. “And I was like, ‘I can’t explain it to you, but if I did that, everyone my age would hate me.’ The stuff that worked a few years ago isn’t going to work now.” Whenever she dismissed grown-ups’ ideas as “corny” or “uncool,” they buckled; no one wants to be uncool in the eyes of a 17-year-old. “It’s like Kryptonite,” she says with a laugh.
In a recent Reddit AMA, she wrote that by starting in the music business at 12, “i learnt early on how things worked and that gave me a good understanding of what could be fucked with/which rules were dumb and shouldn’t have to be followed. plus, I can sit down with basically the most intimidating people in the industry and not flinch, and maybe even make them flinch. or cry. heh.” (Please pause to notice the perfect spelling and punctuation, a particular point of pride. Ella copy-edited her mom’s master’s thesis. She was 14, and her mother got an A+. “I can edit the shit out of something,” Ella says.)
To book Lorde’s concerts, Maclachlan hired a midsize agency in Chicago that specializes in credible, hip acts, including Yeasayer, Girl Talk and Lo-Fang (whom Ella picked as the opening act for her March tour). When the deal was announced, Maclachlan got a stern phone call from an executive at CAA, the L.A.-based talent powerhouse, “who said to me, `You’re making a mistake.” You can probably guess Maclachlan’s reply: “Fuck you.”
Wary of anything she (or her cohorts) would think corny or uncool, Ella has turned down a lot of lucrative offers and opportunities, including sums of money “that would make grown men weep,” says Maclachlan. Her dad works with an accountant to oversee Ella’s finances, which she ignores to such a degree that she seems to be in denial about her wealth. “It’s a lot of money, and I try very hard to not think about it,” she says. “Am I going to make a good record having thought about how much money I have? Probably not.” Why would she need lots of money? She still lives at home.
Ella walks like she’s facing a strong head wind. With her blue-gray eyes facing down, aimed at her clunky black shoes, she leans forward and swings her arms behind her, as she speeds through downtown Auckland, toward a Japanese restaurant where we’re having dinner. “The way I stride is intimidating, I’ve been told. I stride like a man.”
She has a few telling teenage tics, including the way she averts her eyes and murmurs at a question she doesn’t want to answer. Also, for a long time, she wouldn’t play any of her music for her parents, because the idea made her uncomfortable. Maybe she didn’t want them to hear the line “My mother’s love is choking me,” in “The Love Club.” It’s a lyric she wrote after fighting with her mom, she says, fidgeting at the restaurant table. “That song is so… just typical teen angst. I think it’s really childish, now.” (She also calls “Royals,” written when she was 15, “silly.”)
“The Love Club” also considers the way school friendships distance teens from “the people who watched you grow up,” a reference to family. “I fucking love my parents so much,” she says.
Plates of food arrive: beef tataki, tuna sashimi, soft-shell-crab sushi, soybeans with chili, a spider roll. A patron asks for a photo with her, and she crouches down so they’ll both be the same height.
When Ella was young, she stuttered. Psychologists hypothesized that her mouth couldn’t move as fast as her brain. The stuttering has passed, but now she has frequent insomnia. Her mom describes it best: “Ella’s head is always on fire.”
Fortunately, she’s found a slightly older peer she can turn to for advice: Taylor
One and Ella arrived home from America, Swift sent her a bunch of roses: “I was floored.” Ella had recently told a New Zealand reporter that Swift’s success wasn’t “breeding anything good in young girls,” because the singer was “so flawless and so unattainable.” On the heels of her dig at Selena Gomez’s song, the quote quickly turned into blog headlines (“Lorde slams Taylor Swift”), and Ella apologized on her Tumblr, clarifying that she disliked the “importance placed on physical perfection in this industry,” and not Swift personally. Swift didn’t know about any of this, until Ella thanked her for the roses and mentioned what she’d said. “She was like, `It’s fine. If all you’ve done is call someone perfect, it’s not that bad.” On her way home to New Zealand from the Grammy-nominations concert in L.A. last month, Ella stopped in Australia, and joined Swift for her 24th birthday party. Their reconciliation, like their original conflict, took place in public. It makes sense that they’re friends — both are smart and driven, command their own careers, and perform with what Ella calls “real teenage voices.” “There are very few of us,” she continues. “There’s Tavi and the Rookie group, King Krule and, to an extent, Jake Bugg. The other teenagers sing other people’s songs, which is fine, but it’s not an authentic teenage experience.”
After she finishes a bowl of salted caramel ice cream, we head down Queen Street, Auckland’s main commercial strip. She’s recognized by a rowdy mob in their early twenties, probably on their way home from a boozy Christmas party, and after a bunch of pictures, we’re on our way again.
She’s talking about one of her earliest memories, which reveals a kind of serene confidence. When she was two, her mom dropped her at a mall day-care center — “It must have been around Christmastime” — where kids were painting cardboard tubes and decorating them with crepe. Ella picked up a brush and began to dab it on a piece of newspaper, when a grown-up told her she was doing it wrong. “I still remember her voice. And I remember looking up at her and being like, ‘I’m in my own world. I know what I’m doing.” At the age of two, Ella was already Lorde.
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