When 16-year-old Lorde released a single back in 2013, it became clear nothing would ever be the same. Sure enough, 8 years and endless awards later, the Royals singer is one of Hollywood's biggest names. So why did she step out of the limelight for 4 years?
The New Zealand beauty recently sat down with Vogue to talk about her rise to the top - and all the road bumps in between. Unfortunately, as the star put it, her journey to stardom wasn't always smooth sailing. But perhaps with good reason: "I’m not built for pop star life," Lorde explained.
"I’m a highly sensitive person," the artist continued. "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." Sure enough, her sensitivity and shy personality soon came to clash with her life as a global pop star.
"When you’re really famous as a young person, feelings get magnified," Lorde explained of her decision to take a step back from the limelight. "At that time, people were discussing my body on Twitter, and the natural response was to shrink away from it," she confessed.
Fast forward to today, though, and Lorde is officially back and better than ever. "Now? I have a sense of my worth and my power, and my body is—awesome, for one thing," the pop star proudly revealed. "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."
