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Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (born 7 November 1996), known by her stage name Lorde, is a New Zealand singer and songwriter. Born in Takapuna and raised inDevonport, Auckland, she became interested in performing as a child. In her early teens, she signed with Universal Music Group and was later paired with the songwriter and record producer Joel Little, who co-wrote and produced most of Lorde's works. Her first major release, The Love Club EP, was commercially released in March 2013. The project charted at number two on the national record charts of Australia and New Zealand.
In mid-2013, Lorde released her debutsingle "Royals". It became an internationalcrossover hit, peaking atop the USBillboard Hot 100 and eventually made Lorde the youngest solo artist to achieve a US number-one single since Tiffany with her number-one hit "I Think We're Alone Now" in 1987. Later that year, she released her debut studio album, Pure Heroine. The record peaked atop the charts of Australia and New Zealand and charted at number three on the US Billboard 200. Its following singles include "Tennis Court", "Team", "No Better" and "Glory and Gore".
Lorde's music consists of the subgenres ofelectronica, pop and rock, including dream pop and indietronica. In 2013, she was named among Time 's most influential teenagers in the world, and in the following year, she made her way into Forbes 's "30 Under 30" list.
Life and career
1996–2008: Early life
Ella Yelich-O'Connor was born inTakapuna to civil engineer Vic O'Connor and poet Sonja Yelich on 7 November 1996.[1][2][3] She was raised in the nearby suburb of Devonport with two sisters (Jerry and India Yelich-O'Connor) and a brother (Angelo Yelich-O'Connor).[4][5] She is ofCroatian and Irish ancestry.[6] At age 5, Lorde followed her friend into a drama group and discovered a love of singing and acting.[7] In her secondary years, Lorde attended Belmont Intermediate School.[8]Her mother encouraged her to read a range of books, which Lorde cited as a lyrical influence, "I guess my mum influenced my lyrical style by always buying me books. She'd give me a mixture of kid and adult books too, there weren't really any books I wasn't allowed to read. I remember readingFeed by M.T. Anderson when I was six, and her giving me Salinger and Carver at a young age, and Janet Frame really young too."[9]
2009–11: Career beginnings
On 13 August 2009, Lorde joined her band-mate Louis McDonald for a chat on Jim Mora's Afternoons Radio New Zealand. There, they performed covers of Pixie Lott's "Mama Do (Uh Oh, Uh Oh)" and Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody".[10] In that year, they also won the school's annual talent show.[11] McDonald's father Ian sent out his home audio recording of her and Louis McDonald covering Duffy's song "Warwick Avenue", and his home video recording of Lorde and Louis McDonald singing Pixie Lott's "Mama Do", to Universal Music Group (UMG)'s A&R Scott Maclachlan.[9][12]In 2009 Maclachlan signed her to UMG for development.[13]
In 2010 Lorde and McDonald performed covers live on a regular basis as a duet called "Ella & Louis", playing at The Leigh Sawmill Cafe on 15 August, at Roasted Addiqtion Cafe in Kingsland on 20 August, at The Vic Unplugged at Victoria Theatre, Devonport on 27 October, and at Devonstock in Devonport on 12 December.[14] While working on her music career, she attended Takapuna Grammar School from 2010 to 2013, completing Year Twelve.[15] She later chose not to return in 2014 to finish Year Thirteen.[16]
In 2011, UMG hired vocal coach Frances Dickinson to give Lorde singing lessons twice a week for a year.[17] During this time, she began writing songs and was set up with a succession of songwriters, but without success.[18][13] At the age of fourteen, Lorde started reading short fictionand learnt how to "put words together."[19]She performed her own original songs publicly for the first time at The Vic Unplugged II on the Devonport Victoria Theatre main stage on 16 November 2011.[20] In December 2011, MacLachlan paired Lorde with Joel Little, a songwriter, record producer, and former Goodnight Nurse lead singer. The pair recorded five songs for an EP at Little's Golden Age Studios in Morningside, Auckland, and finished within three weeks.[21]
2012–13: The Love Club EP andPure Heroine
In November 2012, Lorde self-released the record, entitled The Love Club EP, through her SoundCloud account for free download.[4] After being freely downloaded 60,000 times, UMG decided to commercially release the EP for sales in March 2013.[13] The project peaked at number two on the record charts of New Zealand and Australia.[22] In June of that year, "Royals" was released as a singlefrom the EP.[23] The single became acrossover hit, peaking atop the USBillboard Hot 100 for nine consecutive weeks.[24] Consequently, Lorde became the youngest solo artist to achieve a number-one single in the US with "Royals", since Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" (1988).[25] The track eventually won the2013 APRA Silver Scroll Award,[26] and twoGrammy Awards for Best Pop Solo Performance and Song of the Year at the2014 Grammy Awards.[27]
In September 2013, Lorde released her debut studio album, Pure Heroine.[28] The album peaked atop the charts of New Zealand and Australia and reached the top five of several national charts, including Canada, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom.[29][30] In the United States, Pure Heroine peaked at number three on theBillboard 200,[31] and has sold 1.33 million copies.[32] Worldwide, Pure Heroine has sold 1.5 million copies by the end of 2013.[33] The album was nominated for theGrammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album.[27] Pure Heroine was further preceded by four singles. "Tennis Court" was released in June 2013,[34] and topped the New Zealand Singles Chart.[35] The third single, "Team", became a top-ten hit worldwide.[31][35] "No Better", a song only included on the extended version of Pure Heroine, and "Glory and Gore" were released as the two final singles from the record, respectively.[36] Her cover of Tears for Fears' single "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was included on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire film soundtrack.[37]In November 2013, Lorde signed a publishing deal with Songs Music Publishing worth a reported $2.5 million after a bidding war between various companies including Sony Music Entertainment and her label UMG. The agreement gives the publisher the right to license Lorde's music for films and advertising.[38][39] Late that year, she also started a relationship with photographer James Lowe.[40][41]
2014–present: Second studio album, touring andMockingjay, Pt. 1 soundtrack
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In December 2013, Lorde announced that she had began writing material for her second studio album.[42] In June 2014, Lorde revealed that her second studio album would be "totally different" from her debut album, continuing to reveal her writing style had changed and that she is working on new music and "it's definitely still at the beginning."[43] In the first half of 2014, Lorde headlined various festivals, including the Laneway Festival in Sydney, Australia,[44] the three South American editions of Lollapalooza — Chile inSantiago,[45] Argentina in Buenos Aires,[46]and Brazil in São Paulo —[47] and theCoachella Festival in California.[48]
To promote The Love Club EP and Pure Heroine, Lorde embarked on a tour, with its first leg happening in North America in early 2014.[49] She further announced the Australian leg (which happened in July)[50]and the second North American leg (which took place in August).[51] In April of that year, Lorde performed "All Apologies" with the surviving members of Nirvana during the band's induction ceremony at the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame.[52] On 1 August 2014, Lorde performed at the Lollapalooza again in Grant Park, Chicago.[53] The set of Lorde was critically well received, with Billboardpicked it as the fifth best performance of the festival,[54] while Rolling Stone deemed it the best segment of the Lollapalooza in Chicago.[55] On 29 September 2014, Lorde released "Yellow Flicker Beat" as the first single from the soundtrack album for the film The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1;[56] Lorde oversaw the organisation of the soundtrack album, and contributed vocals to several of its songs.[57] By her eighteenth birthday in November 2014, it was estimated that Lorde was worth NZ$11 million.[58]
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