New Zealand pop sensation Ella Yelich-O'Connor, aka Lorde, on songwriting, sincerity and her mum's sobering influence
Royals has to be the most deliciously radio-ready critique of wealth you'll hear this year. The song – sly and bratty and sweet and smart – is the work of Lorde, or 16-year-old New Zealander Ella Yelich-O'Connor, a precocious songwriter who sounds a little like a more bookish Sky Ferreira, or a more caustic Grimes.
It came, she explains, out of listening to Watch the Throne, the Kanye and Jay-Z project, as well as Lana Del Rey's album. "What really got me," she says, "is this ridiculous, unrelatable, unattainable opulence that runs throughout. Lana Del Rey is always singing about being in the Hamptons or driving her Bugatti Veyron or whatever, and at the time, me and my friends were at some house party worrying how to get home because we couldn't afford a cab. This is our reality!" she laughs. "If I write songs about anything else then I'm not writing anything that's real."
The success of the track, however, particularly in her native New Zealand, has afforded her several moments that can't have felt very "real". These include being driven to school by her mum and hearing it, without fail, every morning on the radio. "Now we're kind of at the point where if it comes on we turn it down." She adds, apologetically: "I think your parameters for what's really cool change when you experience something like this, you know?"
She's signed to Universal and is due to put out a debut album this September. It all came about in a very unplanned and unexpected way. A few years ago she sang Duffy's Warwick Avenue in a school talent show and a friend's father filmed the performance. He passed on the video to a friend and somehow, somewhere down the line, it ended up in the hands of the man who is now Yelich-O'Connor's manager at Universal. She was just 12 years old then.
"At that age," she says, "I just didn't really understand the scope of what was happening, so I was like, oh God, make these people go away, I don't want to deal with this! You don't really know what you want to do or anything at 12, but obviously I'm glad I followed through because here I am."
She works with producer Joel Little whom she credits with turning her "pages and pages of something" into song form. "You know how Raymond Carver had Gordon Lish, the editor who made him what he was? I feel like Joel was that for me.
"The thing with songwriting is, as soon as you start doing it, you'll never stop, because you're constantly trying to beat what you did last week and get to that imaginary high point where you think: I can't get better than this. But of course that high point never happens because you're always trying to get better."
She's also doing a very good job of keeping her head screwed on. When she returned from the New Zealand music awards, for example, her mum invoked a family phrase: "Remember your place at the table." She explains: "I come from a large family and often there'll be eight or 10 of us eating. So it's a thing at our house to have the adults sitting at one end of the table and, the younger you are, the further down the table you sit. So she was saying, you might be kind of a big shot out there, but here you still have to sit down that end. Which is, I think, a nice way of keeping grounded."