In a Facebook post eloquently marking her passage from adolescence, multiplatinum recording artist Lorde, who has not released new music since 2014, revealed she has been at work writing and recording.
“Tomorrow I turn 20, and it’s all I’ve been able to think about for days,” wrote Lorde, whose birthday is Monday. Now living in New York, the native New Zealander said, “I walk around the city, up by the park and by the health food store and down into the subway, this new age hanging in front of my eyes like two of those Mylar balloons that never come down. Can people see it, I wonder, that I’m about to cross over? On the subway I stare at boys I want to kiss and girls I want to hug. Do you see me?”
Then she writes, “I’m eating raspberries sitting up in bed, thinking about watching ‘The Crown,’ and I probably should have written something nicer ages ago but my head is so full of lyrics and drums these days that this is all I can manage.”
She goes on to describe herself moving from home and being on her own after “a very deliberate choice to withdraw for a little while from a public life.” She wrote, “I started to discover in a profound, scary, blood-aching way who I was when I was alone, what I did when I did things only for myself. I was reckless and graceless and terrifying and tender. I threw sprawling parties and sat in restaurants until the early hours, learning what it’s like to be an adult, even talking like one sometimes, until I caught myself. All I wanted to do was dance. I whispered into ears and let my eyes blaze on high and for the first time I felt this intimate, empire-sized inner power.
“And then,” she continues in her more than 850-word essay, “I wrote a record about it, all of it, so much more than what I’ve written down here, and I’m in New York getting it done. And tomorrow, I’m not a kid anymore, and more and more I’m realizing that the weirdness of those Mylar balloons is going to be okay.”
After posting it, she added on Twitter that a friend had “just pointed out that tonight will be my very last teenage sleep. Sleeping and dreaming such huge parts of my teenage life – to be teenage and in bed is to feel indelibly alive.”
The singer, born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, scored global hits with the Grammy Award-winning single “Royals” and her sole full-length album, “Pure Heroine.” She reached the Billboard top-40 with her most recent single, 2014’s “Yellow Flicker Beat” from the soundtrack of “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1.”
