How did Lorde celebrate becoming the youngest artist in a quarter century to have the #1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100? Pretty much exactly how you’d expect her to.
“I went to see Phoenix last night at Barclays Center,” she said. “And then I went home and went to bed.”
That’s fitting, considering the anti-affluence sentiments of her hit the rare pop song that dares to address the vapidity of the genre itself. Which is why its success is somewhat shocking: neither the track, nor the 16-year-old who sings it, seem to fit within the shiny confines of the Top 10, a rarefied sphere populated by the likes of Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus. And that’s perfectly fine with Lorde.
“It’s hard for me to think about it, because those people are huge stars, but I don’t think of myself as such. Like, I know for fact that my hotel room is super messy, and I’m just a disgusting person in general,” she laughed. “I’m not like ‘Oooh, look at me!’ You feel like those people are godlike beings, not the case with this cat.”
Still, at the same time, she’s not about to downplay the fact that she’s managed to conquer the pop world (“I’m definitely not freaked out,” she said. “Why should I be?”) and done so on her terms. If anything, the success of “Royals” has only emboldened her: Now that she’s got a hit, she’s determined to prove that it wasn’t a fluke.
“I’m super focused on making new music at the moment, and that’s a good way to be if you’ve had some success with past music, rather than be like ‘How am I going to follow this one up?'” she explained. “I think what everyone forgets is that there’s all this stuff, and then in the center is the music you make. I wouldn’t be doing this interview unless I have a record or a body of work to back it up; if there’s no music, there’s literally nothing.
“So I have to be like ‘You have to let me make music, or what is there for us to do?'” she continued. “It’s the thing that I care about the most and it keeps me sane, so I’ve gotten pretty good at saying, like ‘No, I don’t want to do that boring thing, I want to do this cool thing.'”
To that end, she’s already plotting the next single off her debut album Pure Heroine — “I really think ‘Team’ has something, I feel it,” she said — and will attempt to keep writing new material whenever she can. And thanks to “Royals'” slow climb to the top of the charts (it was released in her native New Zealand in November 2012), she’s already prepared to deal with the expectations of following a massive hit. That’s essentially how she wrote her album, after all.
“I wrote ‘Royals’ before I got big, but I wrote the whole record pretty much after, and people seem to like that. I couldn’t not think about it gaining momentum while I was writing,” she said. “I’m just focused on making more music, better music. I think I’ve got some great ideas already.”
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