Lorde has revealed she is “living with heartbreak again” in a heartfelt letter sent to her fans. In the lengthy, honest missive, the singer described her ongoing pain and illness, explaining that she recently pulled out of attending Paris Fashion Week because “I promised myself I’d never be one of the people in the light smiling if it wasn’t real.”
In the letter, Lorde described how she’s currently in London and hasn’t been seeing many people. “Mostly, I’m alone with my thoughts,” she noted. She explained that soon she’ll go to New York, then back home to New Zealand, and she wanted to be honest with fans about her state of mind.
“I’m living with heartbreak again,” she wrote. “It’s different but the same. I ache all the time, I forget why and then remember. I’m not trying to hide from the pain, I understand now that pain isn’t something to hide from, that there’s actually great beauty in moving with it. But sometimes I’m sick of being with myself. I eat chocolate to try and manipulate the endorphins, bring back the sweet happiness of Easter morning. I sit in the time machine and wait for it to move, but it hasn’t been invented yet.”
She continued with the physical impact of the pain, saying her “body is really inflamed.”
“It’s trying to tell me something and I’m trying to support it but nothing seems to help and I get frustrated,” she explained. “My gut isn’t working properly, my skin is worse than ever, I’ve gotten sick half a dozen times. I realized earlier this year that listening to my body is hard for me, it’s something I never really learned how to do. I’ve been trying to teach myself that this year, but it’s been hard actually, pretty confronting, has made me fully aware of all the times I ignored it or didn’t give it what it needed, shamed it for a fight or flight response, took a handful of pills and pushed through.”
Elsewhere in the Lorde recounted taking “two handfuls of mushrooms, solid doses that tasted like green dirt” earlier this year.
“I got a lot of information about what my body had been through in our time so far, what it needed, where God was and where God wasn’t,” she recalled. “I felt in my bones how destabilizing it is to leave home and start a new life the way I did. I also saw that my body is completely magnificent, and that hating it is as futile as hating a tree; that I truly, truly love doing my job, and that my life is like a beautiful tapestry, and every inch of it is precious and has meaning.”
She added that she enjoyed her recent European tour dates and that, while challenging, it’s been inspiring to work on new music.
“It might seem funny or be easy to forget, but I make records because I need to,” she said. “The songs are spells; a spell to let go of something, a spell to unlock a door. Every time I put something into words just as I see it, set it to the right music, a knot comes loose in me. But it hurts too, confronting the knots. I’ve made enough records to know that this feeling of my skin coming off is part of it.”
She concluded the letter with a series of photos and recommendations for books and music. “Don’t worry about me, I still laugh every day, it’s all moving, even when it goes slow,” Lorde confirmed. “I’ve accepted the mission — I have a self to recover.”
Last month, Lorde teased two new songs during her headlining performance at the U.K.’s Boardmasters Festival. Video clips from her set revealed the artist against the outline of a moon and singing new material for what appeared to be two unreleased songs. Set lists posted online by fans showed the potential new titles, “Silver Moon” and “Invisible Ink.”
The musician tapped Caroline Polachek for a performance of “Green Light” at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary, where she also treated the audience to a performance of “Silver Moon.”
Lorde’s third studio album, Solar Power, dropped in 2021.
From Rolling Stone US
