Lorde has opened up about her reluctant pop stardom in a candid interview with Vogue.
The musician, who graces the magazine’s October cover in a daring Schiaparelli creation, knows she’s “great” at what she does, but insists she’s just “not sure I’m the man for the job.”
“I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m not built for pop star life,” the “Solar Power” singer told the magazine. “To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I’m not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar.”
Perhaps it’s why the singer steps back from the spotlight when she can.
“For whatever reason people have allowed me to say, Okay, I’m going to come and do the thing — do the shoot, do the red carpet, speak to the journalists, put the music out — and when I’ve done it to the point of total exhaustion, when I have completely quenched that thirst, I’m going to go home, and you’re not going to see me for two or three or four years,” Lorde told Vogue.
“I’ll be doing the other thing, which is being there for every single birthday and dinner party and cooking every single meal and going on every single walk and taking every single bath,” she added. “And when I’ve done that, and I’m like, all right, that’s enough of that for a little while, I’ll come back again.”
In addition to stepping back from the spotlight for years at a time, Lorde said, she also permanently signed off from social media in 2018.
“I could sense that it would be very bad for the work and for me if I stayed online,” she said.
“I don’t think I’ve met too many people for whom social media is a net positive,” she added.
“You don’t want to be the person shaking their finger, and I’m totally aware that it’s an immense privilege, a social privilege and kind of an economic privilege to be able to abstain. But I think we’ve got to be upfront about the things that are making us sick as a society.”
Head to Vogue to read the rest of Lorde’s interview.