Lorde Opens Up About Becoming an Adult: 'I Just Couldn't Write It All Down Fast Enough'

Lorde looks stunning on the cover of Vogue Australia‘s October 2017 issue, on sale September 25.

Here’s what the 20-year-old “Perfect Places” singer had to share with the mag:

On releasing her debut album (Pure Heroine) at 16 and the constant fuss made over her age: “The hard thing was when people would ask me: ‘Do you feel 16?’ and I’m like: ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been 40.’ It was really confusing.”

“People decided that I was the teenage perspective. They’d be like: ‘Oh, well, it’s not really, because it’s not covering this sort of thing’ and I was like: ‘Ah, I’m just one kid! I can’t be everybody’s voice, you know,’” she says, speaking more out of respect to the gravitas of such a title. She knew she was in a unique position. “It was an interesting thing, and especially because I felt like my writing was so specific and so personal, and people did really take it to be this much wider thing, which is super- flattering.”

On the release of Melodrama reflecting a gear change in her life: “I basically turned 19 and the world was like: ‘Alright, we’re going to toss everything up in the air and it’s all going to come down in a really crazy way.’ All of a sudden I moved out of home, I went through a break- up,” she says of splitting with her boyfriend of three years, photographer James Lowe. “It felt like every day and every night I was totally having my mind blown by all these new things. I really felt like a young adult for the first time, kind of socially … That period was so creative I just was like: ‘Oh, my God.’ I just couldn’t write it all down fast enough. So that’s very much what the record centered around.”

“The whole time I was writing it (Melodrama) I was going out a lot, I was partying a lot, I was going to a lot of shows. I wanted to just be dancing all the time. It was almost like I just want to make the stuff that I want to dance to on Saturday or whatever, which was a super-new thing for me. I think as you do grow up, you go through a break-up and be like: ‘I just don’t want to think about it and I want to drink tequila and dance to Nelly Furtado.’”

For more from Lorde, visit Vogue.com.au.