Does Lorde Write Her Own Songs?

May 2024 · 4 minute read

Lorde’s breakout hit came when she was just sixteen years old, but has she always written her own songs?

Lorde does write her own songs, either alone or with a co-writer. She’s been writing lyrics since she was in high school, and was performing her original music from as young as fifteen. 

Read on to learn more about Lorde’s musical prowess.

Royal Ability

Lorde came crashing onto the musical scene in 2012 with her breakout EP, The Love Club. One of the tracks on this EP was Royals, the song that would lead to her worldwide success. At the time, she was just sixteen years old, but already destined for greatness. 

As a child, Lorde explored dramatical performance and public speaking. Although just five or six years of age, she was already developing the skills needed for the big stage. She was an avid reader, something that she says helped her develop her lyrical skills.

However, it isn’t just her learned skills that enable Lorde to write fantastic songs. She lives with a condition called synesthesia. This is a rare brain disorder that causes involuntary sense perception triggered by everyday things. It can lead a person to assign all kinds of tastes, sounds, smells, or colors to the simplest things.

Lorde isn’t the only artist to live with this condition. Billie Eilish also has synesthesia, and she’s quite outspoken about how it affects her. Lorde has explained that her synesthesia helped her to write her 2017 album. 

When Lorde released her debut EP, she was entirely unknown. She’d spent some time performing with her childhood friend, but that was as far as it went. She was signed to a record label in 2009, but it was for development rather than publication. 

Throughout 2010, Lorde and her friend performed around Auckland, Australia, in small venues. She began professional singing lessons, attending them twice a week throughout a whole year. These lessons were organised by the record label that wanted to develop her vocal skills.

She began writing her first true songs around this time, and shortly after became paired up with a prominent songwriter. 

Dynamic Duo

Lorde was partnered with Joel Little, a singer, songwriter and record producer. Together, they’d go on to co-write the majority of Lorde’s songs. They’d work so closely in fact, that when Lorde won awards for her early work, she’d accept the reward with Little. 

Her first massive success was Royals, a track that helped to sell millions of albums. Lorde was effectively propelled into the public spotlight in 2013 with this song. After the opening success of Royals, she embarked on tours around the world.

You can see the music video for Royals on YouTube. It instantly became one of the most recognisable tracks being played in 2013. Lorde’s iconic, deeper-than-usual vocals compliment the slower paced beat perfectly.

She’s explained that her songwriting process mostly began with the lyrics, before the music. She stated that she could form a song based on a single word. 

In an interview in 2017, Lorde explained that her songwriting took a slight turn. She transitioned from an inclusive perspective, using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’, to a first-person perspective. She went on to highlight that this was because her songwriting had taken a more personal turn, looking inwards. 

On social media, Lorde portrays a strange personality. Taking Instagram as a key example, the singer boasted 6.5 million followers as of 2020. However, she had only posted three pictures in four years, and none of them made any sense.

There was an illegible scribble of text on a black background, a cinema full of people in 3D glasses, and a blurred picture of an unrecognizable performer on a stage. It seemed that Lorde wasn’t willing to subject herself to the consistent social media presence that some stars in her shoes gravitate towards. 

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