Lorde Talks How David Bowie Said She Was Like “Listening To Tomorrow”
Lorde opens up on meeting David Bowie in a thoughtful two-hour interview for online mag Rookie. The breakout star had already talked of her admiration for Arcade Fire, writer Kurt Vonnegut and Beyonce, but she sounded ecstatic when she talked of that Bowie encounter in particular. It was the sort of moment that editor-in-chief (and fellow teen) Tavi Gevinson described as, “Whoa, my life has come full circle” and Lorde would say, “I could creatively die and just be happy forever.”
“Meeting David Bowie was like that. To have someone like that tell you that listening to you felt like listening to tomorrow,” Lorde says, adding, “It was super cute, though — for some reason we were holding hands and just staring into each other’s eyes and talking, and I was like, This is David Bowie’s hand, what am I doing? It was insane. A beautiful moment.”
Among many other things, the Pure Heroine singer also opened up about what appeals to her, compared to the media’s perception of her own appeal. She explained why she admires Kanye West (for “tak[ing] the fall by being the pioneer”) and friend Taylor Swift (for being a terrific arena performer). Then, she reckons with how actual adults reckon with her; she co-signs Gevinson’s synopsis of grown-ups writing about young people, long before she airs out specific reasons why.
“[T]here’s another part of it which I find really strange, which is that so many interviewers, even ones that I consider really intelligent and good writers, will do the, like, ‘Oh, you’re not taking your clothes off like Miley Cyrus and all these girls’ thing, which to me is just the weirdest thing to say to someone,” she says. “But then people will say, ‘She’s always talking about being bored, that’s petulant,” which I feel like is kind of taking the piss out of teenage emotions — just, like, making light of how teenagers feel. When people react that way about things that every teenager experiences, how can you expect to make anything good?”
Perhaps with Bowie’s help, Lorde can figure that out. Check out the rest of the interview at Rookie.
