Lorde has opened up about the unconventional therapy that helped her overcome crippling stage fright.
Appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the Aotearoa pop star recalled suffering from “truly the most horrific stage fright,” a condition she traced back to her early years in community theatre.
Asked how she moved past it, Lorde didn’t hesitate. “Well, it’s MDMA therapy,” she explained. “Truly, like, changed the game on my stage fright.”
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Lorde detailed how the treatment helped where other approaches had failed. “Some of these things live very deep in the body, and you hold on to it,” she said.
“You hold on to a response like stage fright for reasons that no amount of talk therapy or brain use could get at. But when you bypass that and get to the body, something shifts. And that totally happened for me.”
After trying “everything” to manage her performance anxiety, Lorde said the results were immediate. “I was like, oh, it’s over. I know it’s over.”
The revelation arrives as Lorde prepares to release her new album Virgin, due out tomorrow, Friday, June 27 via Republic Records.
She recently shared the final pre-release single, “Hammer“, which she described as “an ode to city life and horniness, tbh.”
“Hammer” follows previous singles “Man of the Year“, which arrived with a mesmerising music video, and “What Was That”, memorably previewed by Lorde during a surprise appearance at New York City’s Washington Square Park in April.
To read more about Virgin, Lorde’s full Rolling Stone cover story will be published tomorrow, June 27, on Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
