Lorde: Behind the Melodrama

"Hating the headlines and the weather and feeling like... Bowie's gone, and Prince is gone, and George Michael's gone, and what's left? I don't want to be alone in my house with Twitter and it's all so fucked. Let's just try and convince ourselves there's a perfect place we can go to, even just for an evening"

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"I went into this record thinking I knew what I was doing and thinking I knew exactly who I was at that moment and what I was going to do and the process as been very confronting and intense and awesome and emotional and it turned out that I wasn't who I thought I was after all."

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"I felt the way I used to feel when I made music as a kid and it felt like I could cry because it's such a relief to get out how you're feeling for the first time. I remember being like 'oh my god'. It was such gratitude for the process. I was like, 'my outlet!'"

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"It's not a historical document. It's not a police record. It's not journalism. I didn't go to journalism school, I'm a writer. It's about what I felt and sometimes you can feel an element of guilt or 'oh god, I shouldn't have immortalised that person', but the song is my way of saying 'it's what I've always been. It's what I was when you met me. It's what I will continue to be after you leave. That's exactly what was going to happen when you kissed a writer in the dark.'"

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"I felt more aware of my age than I ever have making a record. I was in these moments of just being gripped by an emotion and I was like 'I'm feeling this because I'm 20 and everything's fucked-up inside my brain. I'm actually like rewiring to become an adult. All this is insane!'"

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"I was basically speed-dating different producers and songwriters in LA and hating it. And then I walked into a room with [Jack Antonoff] and just felt like I was home. I was like, 'oh, yes. I want to be around you as long as I can and as much as possible.' We were just obsessed with each other."

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"I'm so aware of the thoughts that are so potent in a moment and then, in the light of day, you're like, 'alright, I was being a bit of a drama queen there, but it's all good, I'm over it.' But I went and immortalised it and now everyone who talks to me about that song gives me this look like I'm dying of a terminal disease... but I think that is the nature of writing a record called Melodrama."

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"I wanted to [give the feeling of] just like the big sun-soaked dumbness of falling in love and it's like your whole head is like glue, it's amazing. It is like drugs. It's like 'I just want to be by you all the time, I just want to listen to you talk and look at your face do all those dumb things that it does when you talk.' It's just like this big dumb joy and it's intense – and I feel like the instrumentation in that song kind of helped it get there."

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"Sometimes it is just about having your arms around your friend's shoulders and being drunk and being into the same song."

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"I feel like the essence of Melodrama is 'we present that we just don't care / but we care.' We fucking care! And I'm going to show you. This record is a document about that care."

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"I always want to run toward the thing that feels challenging and scary and exciting, and that didn't feel like a drum and a vocal anymore. Because those types of songs had been number one on the charts for two years. It really felt like there'd been an excess of that type of music, which I am happy for as someone who's in the camp of minimalism, but also I was like – there has to be a different way to express how I'm feeling."

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