Lorde’s biggest regrets about ‘Royals’
In 2013, Lorde emphatically announced herself on the world stage with the release of ‘Royals’, a track that would completely change her life. Arriving as the singer’s debut single, within months, Ella Yelich-O’Connor went from life as a typical teenager in rural New Zealand to an internationally-adored pop star.
Yelich-O’Connor was signed to a record label in 2009 as a 12-year-old. She won a school talent show with her friend, Louis McDonald, whose father sent the recording to Universal Music Group, and Lorde was subsequently signed to a development deal by the label. Over the next four years, Yelich-O’Connor worked tirelessly on her craft before debuting ‘Royals’ as a 16-year-old.
The track had been written the previous year in her family home, and remarkably, it only took Yelich-O’Connor half an hour to finalise the lyrics. All of us look back upon the person we were at 15 with a hint of embarrassment, and Lorde is no different.
Speaking to the Australian magazine, The Music, she said in 2014: “I understand why it worked and why it was kind of a hit, I can see those qualities in it, but at the same time there’s part of me that’s like…these melodies are just not as good as something I could have written now’, or like ‘I definitely wouldn’t have written this lyric this way if I had’ve written it now’…It definitely feels like a bit of a relic now.”
Interestingly, the song had been out for less than a year when Lorde turned her back on the track. Lyrically, ‘Royals’ was inspired by hip-hop, which represented a world that Lorde couldn’t relate to, an aspect she poked fun at through her breakthrough single. The Kiwi singer explained the track’s origin to The Observer: “What really got me is this ridiculous, unrelatable, unattainable opulence that runs throughout.”
She continued: “Lana Del Rey is always singing about being in the Hamptons or driving her Bugatti Veyron or whatever, and at the time, me and my friends were at some house party worrying how to get home because we couldn’t afford a cab. This is our reality! If I write songs about anything else then I’m not writing anything that’s real.”
Staggeringly, ‘Royals’ has sold ten million copies and spent ten weeks atop the Billboard Chart, which was miles beyond Yelich-O’Connor’s expectations. Despite her reservations about the song, it’s undeniably one of the defining pop songs of the 2010s. ‘Royals’ has firmly stood the test of time, and Lorde has also proven herself to be anything but a one-hit-wonder.
