Lorde
Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor is a seventeen-year-old resident of Devonport, New Zealand. Devonport is a picturesque town of about 6,000 as of 2006, not counting its suburbs. It’s a popular tourist site, full of antique shops and bookstores and good restaurants.
Ella is a devout reader, including Sylvia Plath and Raymond Carver among her favorite writers. Her mother is a celebrated poet in New Zealand, as well. Lorde listened to Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac along with soul artists like Etta James, and now names Arcade Fire, Kanye West, and Drake as some of her favorite artists, as well. Ella’s been writing songs, combining her love of poetry and of singing and music, since she was thirteen and signed to Universal that same year, and has been co-writing since she was fourteen. Her first EP, “The Love Club EP,” was released in March 2013 with no major marketing, and she got a #1 single on the New Zealand chart for her song “Royals”, under her stage name, Lorde. “Royals” eventually became a crossover hit in the US, topping the US Hot 100 chart in October 2013. It was the top-selling song of a female artist in the US in 2013. It was also a #1 hit in Australia, the UK, and Ireland. This all happened while Lorde was still sixteen.
Lorde has always been different. When she was two years old, she remembers making some sort of cardboard creation, and an adult tried to tell her to make it a different way, but she was already in her own world.
Lorde even looks different. She dresses in black, wearing dark, purplish lipstick with pale skin and unruly, curly dark brown hair. She’s hardly ever smiling in pictures taken of her, but she doesn’t seem to be sad or angry, just serious and slightly condescending.
She’s had two other minor hits, four Grammy nominations, has been listed as one of the most promising new artists and most influential people of 2013. Her songs are thought to be deep and poetic compared to other modern music. “Royals” is about materialism; craving “things” and succumbing to a materialistic culture: “I've never seen a diamond in the flesh/I cut my teeth on wedding rings in the movies/And I'm not proud of my address/In the torn up town, no post code envy/But every song's like:/Gold teeth/Grey Goose/Tripping in the bathroom.../We don't care, we're driving Cadillacs in our dreams…”
So, we have a lot to look forward to, hopefully, from Lorde.
(I didn’t know how to end this.)