Lorde may be a Grammy-winning artist, but Ella Yelich O'Connor is just your average
Generation Z-er, and like so many of us, she gets ill, hates showing off and obsesses over
onion rings a little too much.
These are some of the things the world doesn’t know about Lorde.
Lorde may seem like she’s in her element on stage, but that doesn’t mean she’s
always dancing like nobody’s watching.
In fact, she actually suffers from terrible stage fright and, according to Vanity Fair,
has a "robust prescription of beta-blockers" to help her cope.
These medications help keep the physical symptoms of anxiety, such as a pounding heartbeat and
shaky voice, under control.
In a 2017 interview, Lorde told Vanity Fair:
"I'm a writer first, and writers are some of the most introverted kooks there are.
It definitely makes no sense, but I have to bridge the gap and do what needs to be done
for the work.
I'm painfully shy, and I have horrific stage fright."
Lorde joined the ranks of acclaimed artists such as Pharrell Williams, Kanye West and
John Mayer when she revealed that she has a neurological condition known as synesthesia.
According to the American Psychological Association, the most common form of this ability is "colored
hearing."
In other words, people see sounds visually as colors.
Only about one in 2,000 people are affected and, in Lorde's case, certain colors correspond
to certain musical notes.
“Sometimes it’s like a bit of a cloud of color that will hang in the air, it's not
a flat color, it's like this depth to it.”
In an interview with The New York Times, Lorde admitted that making an album is a very visual
process for her.
While writing Melodrama, she color-coded each song idea with different hues for different
themes.
For example, sad songs got one color, while songs about partying got another.
She ended up tacking her color-coded notes to a wall to evaluate the patterns and fill
in any gaps or rearrange things if needed.
She told The Times:
"From the moment I start something, I can see the finished song, even if it's far-off
and foggy.
It's about getting the actual thing to sound like what I've been seeing."
It turns out that there’s really no place more perfect to the "Perfect Places" singer
than somewhere that serves up a really, really good onion ring.
In fact, Lorde's fat-filled, fried-up passion actually borders on semi-obsessive.
In an interview on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, the singer confirmed rumors that she
was secretly behind the Instagram account @OnionRingsWorldwide.
That account was exactly what it sounds like: pictures and reviews of onion rings from the
singer's many travels.
“And the other thing you can do to really make an onion ring magical is, um, lightly
pickle the onion before you batter it up.
It takes on this acidity.
It’s incredible.”
Onion rings aside, there’s probably nothing more relatable about Lorde than the time she
burst into tears in the back of an Uber while listening to Rihanna.
During an iHeartRadio Secret Sessions event, the singer claimed her single "Liability"
was the result of one particularly painful Uber ride and a well-placed Rihanna song.
She had taken a long "angry walk" to clear her mind but called an Uber to take her home.
That's when the waterworks began, although she attempted to cry quietly enough that the
driver couldn't hear her.
Lorde said:
"He definitely knew I was crying.
And I was listening to 'Higher' by Rihanna.
But I listened to that song and I was just crying, and I was crying because I was feeling
this very specific feeling of being too much for somebody.”
That feeling inspired "Liability," which she feels gave her a “suit of armor" and helped
her embrace her complicated emotions.
Lorde is one of the few artists who has so much raw songwriting talent that she doesn't
need to use an instrument to pen her hits.
This is kind of a lucky break for her since, according to The New York Times, she doesn't
actually play any instruments.
Though Lorde claimed Melodrama is an album "about being alone," the star eventually had
to enlist a collaborator to make her songs come to life, Bleachers vocalist and singer-songwriter
Jack Antonoff.
Lorde's artistic process is a rare move in the pop world, where most hits are group efforts
worked on by a number of all-star writers.
In contrast, most of Melodrama is solely credited to Lorde and Antonoff, and in reaching Number
One on the Billboard 200, it beat out dozens of other albums which had each utilized whole
teams of writers and musicians.