Lorde is currently preparing to release her third studio album Solar Power next month. So far we’ve only heard the album’s title track, but the singer revealed its tracklist last month. Lorde will be touring the album in Australia in 2022.
Yesterday (13th July) the singer sent another email missive to fans – this time, sharing a slew of her phone’s Notes from between November 2018 and March 2019.
“I was up late last night, scrolling through the Notes folder on my iPhone. Notes has become sort of this mythical zone for the modern songwriter, as with Voice Memos, and it’s true — we are all writing every fucking song using these two applications,” Lorde writes in the letter.
“When I think about any romantic notions I may have had as a kid of writing my songs elegantly in a notebook with pen, I laugh. The truth is, my written hand is really slow. Typing is the fastest I can get something out, and speed is key.
“But my Notes app also functions as a sort of interesting time capsule— I can see lists of groceries or Christmas gifts I needed to buy years ago alongside deep thoughts about where I’m at and what I’m making as they start to form. I took some screenshots last night, cause I thought it could be of vague interest to you.”
In the dozen odd screenshots that follow, Lorde discusses creativity, gets introspective, talks hating the internet (the star is famously online-averse) and makes a prescient reflection on antibodies a year prior to the onset of the pandemic around the world. Take a look below, along with Lorde’s commentary on the notes themselves.
Starting here, late 2018. Hadn’t started writing anything for this album, but having thoughts about it. And starting to hate being online.
Thinking more about myself as a domestic person, a partner, a mother.
Driving back from Matapouri and going through one of those full roaring tunnels of cicada sound, it striking a deep chord.
Starting to conceptualise — again, this is before any music has really been written… Maybe I had one song. Check out the March 7th note that’s basically the Solar Power video… before we’d written it.
Cute tbh
See: 1:15 in SP video…
Believe this more deeply than ever!
And to finish, a weirdly prescient note, a year before this was all anyone talked about:
All images via Lorde.
