As she sits backstage at Le Poisson Rouge in the West Village, 16-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor — a k a Lorde — looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world. It’s almost unnerving how confident this teenager from New Zealand seems, even though at least two film crews are waiting to interview her, a photo shoot is being set up and there’s the small impending matter of playing her first-ever gig on North American soil. The fact she’s already a star in her homeland has definitely stood her in good stead.
“In New Zealand, there’s only ever about two degrees of separation from another famous person,” she nonchalantly tells The Post. “You’ll see a famous TV star in the supermarket. I take the train, but that’s probably the slowest way to get anywhere because I still get stopped!”
Just don’t expect to see Lorde waiting for the L train to Brooklyn anytime soon: The R&B starlet’s profile is currently skyrocketing to a level that will require her to have a team of chauffeurs on speed dial. In March, her EP, “The Love Club,” was released for download and spawned the single “Royals,” a pristine slice of slow-motion R&B dripping in Lorde’s alluringly dusky vocals. Her first full-length album, “Pure Heroine,” drops Monday, and she’s slated to perform three concerts in New York this week (two at Webster Hall and one at Warsaw in Brooklyn).
In June, “Royals” debuted in the lower reaches of the charts, but thanks to blanket radio airplay and plenty of industry buzz, the song’s currently No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 — just behind pop megastars Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball.”
It’s a suave and sexy song, but perhaps most striking about “Royals” is Lorde’s unusually eloquent lyrics — which she wrote in just a half-hour — that take a cheeky swipe at bling culture. In particular, the line “Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece/Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash” is up there with anything Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar or even Kanye has penned recently.
“English is my strong suit at school,” Lorde says. “I’ve written for most of my life, especially short fiction. I think I wrote my first short story when I was about 9 — it was about how my dog died! I used to sit in on my mom’s lectures for her creative writing master’s degree. I also helped her edit her thesis when I was 14. She got an A-plus.”
And there’s plenty more where that came from. Among the Portis-head-style beats and Lana Del Rey vocals on Lorde’s new album are beautifully crafted stories. She sings about the things that occupy most teenage minds — friends, family, growing up — but sports the vocabulary of someone twice her age. “Lyrics should be able to stand by itself, as a written piece of work,” she says. “That’s why people find me refreshing.”
To most onlookers, the singer’s rise to fame seems to have happened over the course of a few short months, but it’s actually been years in the making. When she was 12, Lorde’s now-manager, Scott Maclachlan, saw an online video of her singing at a talent contest and signed her to a development deal with Universal. “Right from the [start], lyrically, her words were incredible,” he recently told Billboard.
Even now, Lorde writes lyrics first, then takes them to her producer and fellow New Zealander Joel Little before the two carve out their sound together. The normal music industry trick for creating a pop starlet is to have some eye candy fronting someone else’s songs. But Lorde proudly keeps her distance from over-sexualization — both lyrically and visually.
“It’s been that way for so long,” she adds, wearily. “I think a lot of female musicians don’t want to rock the boat, but it also keeps happening because so many pop songs have been written by the same pop writer for the past 15 years.” She’s careful not to mention names, but it’s safe to say the next Lorde video probably won’t feature her trying to twerk or licking a sledgehammer.
As she’ll show at her gigs this week, Lorde’s take on feminism is, simply, to be independent and articulate. “A lot of women in the music industry in general say things like, ‘I’m not a feminist — I love men,’ ” she says. “It’s such an 18th-century perspective. Feminism doesn’t have to be all about burning your bras and not shaving under your arms.”