Lorde’s Bid for the Big Time

Lorde makes it into the New Yorker this week, the subject of a profile by contributor and music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who conducted several conversations with the 16-year-old about, amongst other things, how important control is to her.

“She is like a pop star who has already watched the Behind the Music special about her, and has been tipped off to all the ways she might be exploited,” Frere-Jones writes.

“The exciting thing about Lorde is not merely that Pure Heroine is perfect (it is close), or that Royals is perfect (it is), but that a teenager from Auckland, with an unnatural gift, has entered the suit-infested ruins of the music business with the confidence of a veteran and the skills of a prodigy.

“She is less a flashy new mansion in the suburbs than an architectural gem in a tiny neighbourhood.

“Halfway through the eleven-song set [at her first US show in New York’s Le Poisson Rouge], a man with white hair, dresses in a silver suit, turned to a companion, pointed to the stage, and, implying a big payday in Lorde’s future, said, ‘Zeroes. Lots and lots of zeroes.’”