Lorde has performed ‘Solar Power’ album track ‘California’ live on The Late Late Show With James Corden as part of her week-long residency.
The New Zealand singer-songwriter sang the cut from her new album amid a beach scene constructed for the US talk show. A clip from the performance yesterday (August 24) shows Lorde sitting on a beach towel, surrounded by sand, a lone guitarist, and a boombox that seemed to play part of the song’s music.
Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, also chatted to host James Corden about the process for writing ‘Solar Power’. She explained that much of her focus came from giving up social media in order to better form her own opinions and ideas on things.
“I did it because I felt like my brain wasn’t working very well anymore,” she explained. ‘It was horribly difficult, hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
She went on to compare the move to cutting out sugar, describing feelings of crabbiness and disconnection. “But I will say, the brain can make anything into a social network,” she added, revealing that her new “social network” is The New York Times‘ cooking app, adding: “That’s become a source of community for me.”
Lorde continued: “I felt like I didn’t have time to decide how I felt about anything. I just would be like, ‘What does everyone else think?’ And some version of that would be what I think – now I just give it a bit more time.
“But it’s very, very difficult, and I truly only do it because I’m trying to write songs and I was wasting a ton of time. No halo.”
Earlier this week Lorde performed her album’s lead single and title track to kick things off for her residency, was has been dubbed The Lorde Lorde Show With Lorde.
‘Solar Power’, the follow-up to 2017’s ‘Melodrama’, was released last week (August 20).
In a five-star review of the album, NME’s Rhian Daly wrote: “‘Solar Power’ reflects Lorde pulling from Earth not just lyrically, but musically too. Where ‘Pure Heroine’ and ‘Melodrama’ were filled with euphoric synths and crisp digital sounds, this album peels away all our technological advances and relies on more organic sounds.”
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