Lorde isn’t “built for pop star life”.
The ‘Royals’ hitmaker acknowledges she is “great at [her] job” as a singer but believes she is lacking in “natural charisma” and finds it difficult to have her every move scrutinised because she’s in the public eye.
She told the new issue of America’s Vogue magazine: “I’m great at my job, but I’m not sure I’m the man for the job. I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m not built for pop star life.
“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.”
But the 24-year-old singer has found a balance that works, and will push herself to”total exhaustion” with her career for a period of time before taking a step back again to lead a normal life.
She explained: “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.
“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. 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.”
Lorde shot to fame when she was just 16 and admitted she’s in a much better place now with her confidence than she was then.
She said:
“When I said I felt young for the first time—it meant feeling like I’m confident enough to put my butt out there. I wouldn’t have been able to do that as a teenager.
“When you’re really famous as a young person, feelings get magnified. At that time, people were discussing my body on Twitter, and the natural response was to shrink away from it.
“Now I have a sense of my worth and my power — and my body is awesome, for one thing. But it’s also not as central as my brain is to the whole operation.
“I don’t think you could make me feel bad about myself now by saying something about my body, but that’s the difference between 16 and 24.”
