FEATURE:
In His Own Write…
IN THIS PHOTO: Lorde/PHOTO CREDIT: Theo Wenner for Rolling Stone UK
The Dream of the In-Depth Interview with a Major Artist
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IT is bittersweet…
PHOTO CREDIT: Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels
being an independent music journalist. There is the autonomy to write what I want when I want. I do not have to stick to a particular writing or formatting style – which is a relief, but it also something I might change in the future -, and there is the freedom to work the hours I want. I can react to music news stories and do my own features. There are strict rules with music magazines and magazines where you have to pitch ideas or it can be difficult to get your work seen. It is hard to sustain a blog when you are independent. Making money can difficult unless you have advertising or subscribers. Most do not. Because of that, sustainability and growth is very hard. Many blogs call time. Also, if you have quite a small following (like me) then getting post engagements and traction is tough. You can dream big but the reality is that it is hard to lure big artists. However, as I have been doing this for nearly fourteen years, there is the possibility of making a blog a reality that is a long-term thing. There are not enough working-class music journalists around. More than there were, yet many who work for bigger sites and magazines are privately educated. There are flaws of being an independent. You can miss out on so much. Those huge interviews with mainstream artists. The sort of access to locations and artists that are out of reach. Having a big following that means your work can get seen by thousands of people. However, there are plenty of advantages in terms of flexibility. My blog has been going for a while and has never made any money. The costs are not that high. Away from domain and the annual registration and upkeep of my blog on Squarespace, I am not really incurring big costs. I don’t go to gigs much and I can keep expenses quite low. I realise that things are difficult for sites that I go to all of the time. Whether you are NME, Rolling Stone, The Line of Best Fit, CLASH, The Forty-Five, DIY or anyone like that, there are going to be challenges staying afloat.
IN THIS PHOTO: Nadine Shah
I can do pretty much anything that bigger websites can do in terms of reviewing albums and songs and highlighting artists. The thing that I aspire to is doing a long interview with a major artists. There are many that I have in my sights. Nadine Shah and Billie Marten are artists I have always wanted to interview. Big dream interviews like with Paul McCartney. There are many more that are in my mind. I am glad that this side of music journalism is still flourishing. One of my favourite recent interviews is from Rolling Stone UK and their talk with Lorde. The interview is brilliant and it is such an immersive and engaging read. The photography is wonderful too. It is an extensive piece, but I want to highlight the final parts of Brittany Spanos’s interview. It is such a vivid and fulsome interview. That sort of long read that is music journalism at its very best:
“Lorde had been reading her own Wikipedia page recently while in a meeting. There’s a quote she had given as a teenager that stuck out to her: “I have nothing against anyone getting naked… I just don’t think it really would complement my music in any way or help me tell a story any better.”
“That’s the evolution right there,” she says. An hour earlier, at the shoot with Brown, she had draped herself over a sofa in her underwear.
As a teenager, Lorde felt protective of her body and her sexuality. Her clothes acted as a kind of armour: long sleeves, high necks, opaque colours. It was a double-edged sword, though: Lorde debuted around the same time that a generation of teen superstars were starting to grow up. Artists like Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez were shedding the purity rings and forced modesty of their Disney careers in order to embrace their bodies and sexual agency. Lorde, by contrast, became a symbol of some type of moral purity, and her modesty was, in essence, used to slut-shame her peers.
“I remember vividly in that first year of being famous, so many people saying — I’m paraphrasing — ‘It’s so good you don’t take your clothes off like these other sluts,’” she says. “I was up on a pedestal because I wasn’t employing the same tools. And I remember being like, ‘No, no, I will take my clothes off one day. Be ready.’ I’ve always known that having those qualities ascribed to me so young [meant that] me being more open with my body, with my sexuality, [would] carry real weight and agitate and alienate.”
There were expectations placed on Lorde about how a girl becoming a young woman should act. It was another way she made herself small, trying to please the world and be good. But as she oozed, she redefined herself, and she saw that her gender identity could get bigger, too. On Virgin’s opening track, she lays the tale of her rebirth bare: “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man.”
I ask her how she identifies now, what it means and what’s changed. “[Chappell Roan] asked me this,” Lorde recalls. The pair have become close friends over the past year. “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Though Lorde still calls herself a cis woman and her pronouns remain unchanged, she describes herself as “in the middle gender-wise,” a person more comfortable with the fluidity of her expression. In some ways, she feels like her teenage self again, back when her friends were mostly boys and there was a looseness in how she dressed and acted.
PHOTO CREDIT: Theo Wenner for Rolling Stone UK
In 2023, she went shopping at clothing store C’H’C’M’ and tried on a pair of men’s jeans. She sent a picture to Stack to get his opinion. “He was like, ‘I want to see the you that’s in this picture represented in the music.’ This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all.”
Towards the end of that year, she went off birth control for the first time since she was 15. “I’ve now come to see [my decision] as maybe some quasi right-wing programming,” she admits, presumably referring to years of far-right influencers pushing anti-contraception disinformation. “But I hadn’t ovulated in 10 years. And when I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done.”
She wrote the album’s opening track soon after, as well as ‘Man of the Year’. She felt like she had superpowers, like being off birth control had peeled a film off her life. But the “best drug” came with bigger crashes than she had ever experienced. She would be diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of PMS that causes debilitating mood swings, among other symptoms; she has since inserted the IUD visible on her album cover. The experience opened up an avenue of discovery she hadn’t anticipated. “I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she explains. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.”
When Lorde wrote ‘Man of the Year’, she was sitting on the floor of her living room, trying to visualise a version of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment”. What she saw once again was an image of herself in men’s jeans, this time wearing nothing else but her gold chain and duct tape on her chest. The tape had this feeling of rawness to her, of it “not being a permanent solution”.
“I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she tells me. “I have this picture staring at myself. I was blond [at the time]. It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”
We talk about the Trump administration’s war against the trans community. While opening up about her own identity terrifies her, she knows she has less on the line than people whose gender identity does not match what they were assigned at birth.
“I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” she says. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I’m not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”
As the candle burns down, Lorde recalls a moment after her second psychedelic therapy session. She found herself searching for the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape. She’s not sure why, but she watched the whole thing.
PHOTO CREDIT: Theo Wenner for Rolling Stone UK
“I found it to be so beautiful. And maybe it’s fucked up that I watched it, but I saw two people that were so in love with each other, and there was this purity. They were jumping off this big boat… They were like children. They were so free. And I just was like, ‘Whoa. Being this free comes with danger.’”
The consequences of freedom have been on Lorde’s mind a lot lately. She’s realised the consequences of not taking these risks would be worse. “It feels worse to keep it all bolted down,” she says. “But God, of course, I’ve had many moments in the last couple years where I’m like, ‘If I could just have a nice normal life where you don’t elicit any strong reactions from anyone.’ But that’s not my path.”
In late April, Lorde shoots the final scene for the ‘What Was That’ video. The idea is to dance and lip-synch to the single in the centre of Washington Square Park’s fountain at dusk, surrounded by fans, whom she tipped off via a texting service she’s been using to communicate with them. Lorde was genuinely not sure how many people would show up. She had also started to get cold feet about the video being shot on iPhone, “pre-party jitters” getting the best of her.
She decided to cast a wider net for a crowd to join her, posting a shot of the park’s fountain on her Instagram story. Within a couple of hours, thousands had showed up — so many that the NYPD shut it down. Lorde was getting ready in her apartment when she got word.
Her team and video crew were in panic mode. It seemed like weeks of planning had just come crashing down. On Instagram, she removed her story announcement, then told everyone to disperse, due to orders from the NYPD. But just a few blocks away, Lorde wasn’t worried. “I get very calm in a crisis,” she says. If Virgin, in its clearness, is about keeping the scars visible, then this hiccup fitted perfectly in the world she was about to build. “I was like, ‘This is amazing. This is such a good thing.’”
In the chaos, she called up Dev Hynes, with whom she regularly walks through the park. He was there already, en route to play football with friends, and stopped to play Lorde’s new single for the fans while she looked on via FaceTime. Meanwhile, Lorde watched the sunset from her building’s rooftop.
Sometime after 8:30, dusk had passed and the park had emptied out just enough for Lorde to finally emerge; by then, riot police were on location at the park (“and Counterterrorism, or something,” she says). She and her small crew were able to shoot one, three-minute take in the fountain — and they nailed it. The video was edited that night and posted online just two days later. Virgin came to life. By the weekend, ‘What Was That’ would become her first number one song on US Spotify since ‘Royals’.
When Lorde first moved to New York City, she used to avoid walking through Washington Square Park. With its throngs of young people congregating in all corners, it was a space that forced her to confront the fact that where she lives is no longer separate from where she exists as an artist.
Once she let go, she began to embrace the intimate one-to-one conversations with her fans that are part of her everyday life. It was again in the park that she recognised what this was all about: the very pure, clear channel between her and her uncasual listeners. “I’m kind of an intense bitch,” she says. “I’ve connected with the mission to do what only I can do. It’s enough”.
There are so many more examples. Rolling Stone/Rolling Stone UK are particularly fine examples of publications/websites where you get these detailed and long interviews. The New Yorker and The New York Times. NME do some deep dives too. I think a lot of what we get in terms of music news and information is quick and short. Hannah Ewens is someone who has conducted so many engrossing interviews for Rolling Stone and Rolling Stone UK. It is always a thrill reading these interviews because you picture yourself in the scene. A real sense of time and space. Background and biography. Modern context and some incredible exchanges. I wanted to highlight the Lorde interview as it is one of my favourites of this year. However, there are so many other examples. This great interview from Lucy Dacus from The New Yorker is another gem. I do love these long-rolling magazines and publications like The New Yorker. That has been going for a century now! Even though it focuses on more than music, I love their music journalism and style. Rolling Stone too. The fact that there are a lot of British music websites still going strong is cause for hope. At a time when music journalism is not as healthy and prolific as it once was, we are still seeing these phenomenal interviews and features. Many websites do have paywalls, though it is a gift that you can access many without payment.
IN THIS PHOTO: Lucy Dacus/PHOTO CREDIT: Lenne Chai for The New Yorker
Advertising revenue is the reason behind that, though it is also nice to give people a taste of what you produce and then seeing if they would like to subscribe. It is not a luxury many independent blogs and websites can do. It is something I want to do one day. Beautiful and interesting photos and an in-depth interview. There is a chance of it happening, though I think you have to have a bit more experience than me to get that sort of chance. Bigger interviews. I would love to head to the U.S. and interview Ringo Starr. Nadine Shah in a London interview. I want to approach legends and modern-day greats. I look at these new interviews coming out and it sparks something in me. However, it does seem far-fetched at the moment. A lot of my work gets overlook and people are mainly interested in Kate Bush stuff. That is a mixed blessing. I would like for more of my other features to get noticed and shared. However, I do have this platform where I can write what I want. I have been going for years, so I do not have much cause for complaint. It is only natural to dream bigger and have that sort of ambition. I hope one day I can get a commission for a big music website and feature a wonderful artist. I guess I need to keep putting the work in and do some more interviews soon. I am not sure whether I will branch out and do podcasts and audio interview. Maybe not at the moment. Perhaps expand what I post to Instagram and get noticed that way. I will come up with a solid plan going forward. I guess I should be proud I have a blog that is still being read (though not as much as I would like) over thirteen years later. Not many independent journalists can say that! Putting the effort and dedication in, it is something that I have…
IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
WORKED so hard to achieve.