![]() She pointed out a potted houseplant atop a glass vitrine stacked with colorful cakes. Over subsequent visits, she developed a deep attachment to the place its unchanging vinyl upholstery, grid-patterned pendant shades and Italian omelets helped to make an increasingly untethered existence feel more rooted. Lorde discovered the Flame by chance one night in 2013, during her first trip to America, lured by nothing more tantalizing than the neon sign reading OPEN 24 HOURS. We took a booth and ordered a midnight breakfast of eggs and zucchini sticks. Our destination was a diner near Columbus Circle called the Flame, which sat beneath a Qi Gong parlor and whose brick facade was nondescript in the extreme. Her thinking is that this gesture, warm and direct in its appeal, will pre-empt any further encounter - “and it usually does.” When Lorde does spot someone spotting her, she went on, her move is to smile, place a finger to her lips and mouth a conspiratorial shh. #Ribs lorde form full#As we rumbled northward, her face was in full fluorescent light, and I wondered if people ever bothered her during these rides. While making “Melodrama,” Lorde took lots of subway rides, auditioning rough mixes of songs on cheap earbuds, which helped give her a sense of how the music would sound in daily life. We pushed through the service exit, walked along empty streets and boarded an uptown 1 train. Kanye West introduced himself as a fan Taylor Swift became a buddy David Bowie clasped Lorde’s hands in his and proclaimed that listening to her music “felt like listening to tomorrow.” The question nagging her here in New York, as she worked to meet the new album’s June release date, was what the day after tomorrow sounded like. ![]() “Pure Heroine” sold more than one million copies in five months, making Lorde the first female artist with a million-selling debut album since Adele and establishing her as a wunderkind pop auteur. Her lyrics brought an unlikely incandescence to avowedly mundane snapshots of suburban teendom. It was a marvel of understatement - unhurried electronic beats, pared-down harmonies, empty spaces. The album that made Lorde a celebrity, “Pure Heroine,” came out in 2013. She’d gotten this key from management so that she could come and go without worrying about cameras. This hotel often hosted celebrities, she explained - “You might see Meryl Streep you might even see a Jonas Brother” - who, in turn, drew photographers. The elevator opened onto a barren nether-floor, where Lorde took a narrow staircase down to a service exit. “It’s about getting the actual thing to sound like what I’ve been seeing.” Her goal is to correct the colors and sharpen the contours until the precise configuration of chords, rhythms, emotions and textures she has been glimpsing all along snaps into focus. “From the moment I start something, I can see the finished song, even if it’s far-off and foggy,” she said. Lorde has a neurological condition known as sound-to-color synesthesia - when she hears certain notes and sounds, corresponding colors appear - and she describes making music in intensely visual terms. Lorde owns a house in Auckland, where she grew up, but for the better part of the last year she has been living at different hotels around New York, trying to finish her second album, “Melodrama.” She began writing it about three years ago, first in her childhood home and later at a villa she bought on what she described as the other, fancier side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbor. “We’re going out a secret way,” she said, turning a lock on the wall. i want to take you somewhere.” Now, boots clacking, she led me around the corner and into an elevator, where she fished a stubby key from her pocket. She’d sent me a message earlier on, hinting at some unspecified adventure: “Will txt you when i get out of the studio. Her hair fell to the collar in waves, and the overall effect, in the light of the fireplace, was of an extremely chic witch ready for a night of haunting. “I thought about saying something, but I decided, Nahhh.”Ī late-winter blizzard was forecast to blow into town that night, and Lorde was dressed for the cold in pointy black boots and a voluminous Chloé overcoat whose wool folds hung around her like a midnight-colored cloud. “I actually saw the Edge in the gym here,” she said with a grin. Lorde found a smaller studio available farther uptown, and though the move was inconvenient, she saw the humor in being inadvertently evicted by Bono - it was just one more marker of how strange her life has been since she became famous, four years ago, at 16. She’d been commuting daily to a Greenwich Village recording studio, plugging away at new music, but today U2, who had reserved the space, arrived and commandeered it. Lorde, the New Zealand-born pop star, came into the fire-lit lounge of her downtown Manhattan hotel a few minutes past 11, apologizing for the lateness of the hour - funny story, she said. ![]()
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