Lorde, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor is a New Zealand singer and a songwriter. She was born in Auckland, the suburb of Takapuna in 1996. Lorde was born and raised in a very poor neighborhood. People used to starve and have very improper livelihood conditions in that region. Lorde was also from a poor family, that could not afford any luxury items. Though, she was always determined to skip that kind of life and to make her life comfortable.
Ella Marija was in love with the aristocracy and royals, such as Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI of France and King Nicholas II of Russia. This was the inspiration for adopting her stage name, Lorde. She was always a talented kid and expressed interest in performing at local venues in her early teenagers.
Her career started in 2009 when she signed the agreement with the Universal Music Group and began her collaboration with producer Joe Little. She started recording her material with Little in 2011. The music, produced by Lorde is an electro-pop and contains elements of sub-genres such as dream pop as well as indie-electro. Lorde has two Grammy Awards on her account. She was also nominated for Golden Globe and Brit awards. Alongside her musical nominations, Lorde was included in Time’s list of the most influential teenagers in 2013 and 2014. In 2014 she was also included in the Forbes 30 under 30 lists. According to the reports, she has sold over five million albums worldwide by 2017.
Rookie singers in NZ
Lorde lived in a poor neighborhood. People there were not like those pop stars, who are used to riding luxurious cars, wear designers’ clothes and have villas in several places all across the world. Famous pop singers from all over the world would be invited to perform at different events in different venues. Takapuna also had some of the luxury venues, mostly dedicated to gambling.
Actually, casinos used to be one of the biggest employers for rookies singers in NZ in the past. Some of the best online casinos New Zealand would contract young singers in performing their songs for new games or events on their platforms, while offline venues would simply throw parties or concerts for their VIP guests.
Unfortunately, Lorde was not part of the few who got the offer for performing in a casino, and for the better as well.
How it all started
She was a girl who was raised in a family where fights and harassment would be a daily thing. She could see it all inside her family as well as outside of the family. Though, she would always want to live a different life.
While being a teenager, she used to listen to Kanye West, Jay Z, and Lana Del ray. Those were the artists, who influenced her the most. Moreover, their life was the inspiration for her best known and the most successful song of the Royals. Lorde wrote the song when she started a collaboration with Little. She said that Little was the person that she enjoyed working with. He was not like any others in the industry, but the opposite was very attentive and supportive of her decisions.
Lorde wrote the Royals in literally an hour and a half. She wrote it on the way to Little. She put all her inspiration, the knowledge and the outlook on the world into this song. Little approved the song and liked it instantly. He worked on the song every day and in the end they got one of the best selling and most listened songs on the Billboard. The chords of the song are something similar to Katty Perry and Pharell Williams. The chor starts with the loud tunes and then drops down at the main chord. This technique is used in the Royals and in Pharell Williams’ Happy as well.
We will never be Royals
If you have at least once listened to the song, you would most probably get it all. The lyrics are all about the people who drive Cadillacs and the people who are nervous about going to parties, just because they do not have the money for the cab. This is the story of people who are lucky to be born in wealthy families, and people like Ella and her friends, who could only dream of luxury cars and diamond rings.
If we go along with the lyrics, we can read the thoughts from the lines. It is all about people who were never born as royals and thus could never afford the life of the stars. The lyrics tell us that Lorde and her friends were ordinary teenagers, who were not really proud of their addresses, though have their own dreams and goals.
The main goal for those teenagers was to escape the present life to create life similar to the movies. Basically, this is what Lorde did with her own life. After she released the song, it got popular instantly and was the leader of different charts and billboards. She could have never imagined that.
The lyrics can remind us that we are all sculpted from different material and it is not necessary for everyone to be the same and for everyone to wear expensive clothes, in order to stand out from the crowd. Lorde did stand out with her talent and stood out with her passion for achieving her goal. This is what helped her to create the life she was dreaming about while writing the lyrics for the Royals at her home in New Zealand.
With the release of the song it soon topped Billboard Hot 100. While expressing her reaction to the great news, Lorde said that the feeling was very much similar to having the Birthday and Christmas celebration, together with being able to wash your head for the first time through a long period. She was the youngest artist to top the US chart since Tiffany in 1897. She was also the first artist from New Zealand to achieve Billboard Hot 100 #1 as a lead artist.
Lorde became the youngest solo artist to write and perform a Hot 100 chart-topper at the age of 17. The previous record belonged to Soulja Boy Tell’em. Thus, American rapper still remains in the first position as his song was written and produced by himself, unlike the Royals, which was produced by Joel Little.
Together with the love of royals and popular American singers, the inspiration for the song was from the photo holding on Lorde’s wall. The photo featured baseball legend, George Brett. She said that she had an image from National Geographic. In the picture, the baseball legend wore a t-shirt that said “Royals”.
The Royals was named the Best Song of 2013 by MTV News. The commentator also said that although she might never be a royal, the single and the record have already influenced the whole music industry. She won the Song Of The Year at the Grammy Awards in 2014. She also received the award for the Best Pop Solo Performance for the song. She performed the song at the awards.
While most of the teenagers of her age, wrote about love and unhappy or happy relationships, Ella decided to put something more into the words. She took one of the most crucial subjects and wrote something very unique and authentic about her own experience.
We might not be royals, and this might not be in our blood, but it should never prevent us from having big dreams and doing great things.
