Bruce Springsteen: Tracks II – Lost albums brim with emotional generosity, suppressed pain, and machismo
Tracks II: The Lost Albums
Artist
:
Bruce Springsteen
Label
:
Sony Music
For many Bruce Springsteen fans, bigger is always better and more is never enough. Springsteen would seem to agree. At the age of 75, he recently concluded his third European tour in as many summers, and it's just a few short years since his blockbusting Broadway show, in which, night after night, he navigated the peaks and valleys of a life lived with the hood down and the foot on the accelerator.
Such maximalism reaches its apotheosis with Tracks II: The Lost Albums project. Consisting of 83 songs, most never previously released, this boxed set to beat all boxed sets spans the years from the early 1980s up to 2018. It runs the gamut of Springsteenisms, from old-school Jersey-shoreline rock'n'roll to rumpled country pop via delightful diversions into new wave, indie rock – did you ever think Springsteen could sound a bit like New Order? He does here – and cinematic mood music.
It's a lot, even for Springsteen. And with the nine-disc vinyl package retailing for north of €300, he is charging a premium, too (mirroring his strategy on ticket pricing across recent tours).
But it is also a delightful trip to the dark side of Bruce: seven complete albums brimming with earnestness, emotional generosity, suppressed pain, vulnerability and machismo.
READ MORE
Tracks II, which follows the 1998 boxed set Tracks, begins with LA Garage Sessions '83. The recordings capture in granular detail the period between Springsteen's insular masterpiece Nebraska and the world-conquering bombast of his album Born in the USA, from 1985.
A snapshot of an artist on the cusp of commercial greatness, it begins with the lulling but largely conventional Follow That Dream (which could have slotted into either The River or Nebraska without anyone noticing). But it then veers into unexpected pastures with The Klansman, which strays into 1980s synth pop as it tells the story of a young boy indoctrinated into the Ku Klux Klan.
A different Springsteen is on display on the more pensive Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, the existence of which has long been known by Springsteen fans, who refer to it, quasi-mystically, as the Drum Loop Album because to its use of repeating drum beats.
Its opening track, Blind Spot, sets the pensive tone. Bathed in the same contemplative aura as the singer's Oscar-nominated single The Streets of Philadelphia, from 1993, it is beautifully moody and largely free of Springsteen's traditional bombast.
The album is fantastic. So why didn't he release it in the early 1990s? He reasoned that it 'didn't fit the narrative' he wanted to present at the time. The implication is that he felt it unwise to follow up Tunnel of Love, his largely minimalist 1987 album, with another downbeat record. You can appreciate his logic, but what a shame we've had to wait 30 years to hear this fantastic collection.
Still, not all of Springsteen's experiments are as successful: you can understand why some of the material has lingered in the vault. Somewhere North of Nashville, for example, is a grab-bag of 12 country rock and rockabilly-inspired tunes from 1995 that find Springsteen expurgating his inner Johnny Cash to underwhelming effect.
But while that project feels like a calculated risk that didn't pay off, Springsteen conjures an effortless magic on Inyo, a late-1990s suite that draws on Latin American music without sounding as if Springsteen is squatting on someone else's lawn. As pastiche goes, it is both respectful and understated.
He has explained that he recorded the material while touring the folk-oriented Ghost of Tom Joad, only to nix a release because he felt it was too much in the same soulful vein as that previous record. Such is the astuteness that has helped Springsteen stay relevant across six decades.
The sheer volume of music presented by Tracks II often verges on overwhelming. Yet even on an initial listen it's the moments when Springsteen is going all in rather than trying random genres on for size that leave the deepest impact.
In that regard, the most moving of the seven 'albums' is surely Faithless (nothing to do with the 1990s techno titans, more's the pity). Described by Springsteen as a 'meditation on purpose, belief and acceptance', it was recorded in 2006 for a 'spiritual western' movie that never came to fruition.
Its 11 numbers, including several instrumentals, are profoundly moving meditations on life, death and what comes after. Amid an avalanche of outtakes that is all about size, it is these small, quiet songs that hit hardest.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘Maybe Elon Musk is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories'
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci via the songwriting chemistry of Lennon and McCartney to the Florida launch pad of Elon Musk's SpaceX , Helen Lewis's new book, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers, sets out to unravel the mystery of what we mean when we call someone a genius and asks whether the modern idea of genius as a class of special people is distorting our view of the world. There's a sense throughout the book that these people are modern versions of saints, that they're performing something sacred in our increasingly secular world. It is a really compelling argument, made by historian Darrin McMahon in his Divine Fury: A History of Genius, that during the Enlightenment, when people became more rationalist, less religious, we still craved this sense of the divine. The idea that miracles happen in the world. Where you might once have thought that a miracle was attributable to the Virgin Mary, now the miracle is: how did Van Gogh's paintings happen? How did someone have this moment of inspiration where they came up with this scientific breakthrough? There is this deep hunger within all of us for the world not to be mundane, for there to be things that are still extraordinary within it. Even the phrase 'gifted', which people sometimes use about children and young people. Gifted by whom and for what purpose? READ MORE In classical times, you were possessed by 'a genius'. The muse of poetry or whatever spoke through you. I think that was a much more healthy way to think about it. The argument in the book really is about this category of special people and what that does to us and to them. It's much healthier to say I've done something extraordinary rather than I'm an extraordinary person and everything I do is probably going to be brilliant. That's the bit that tends to lead people astray. You look in the book at the story of how Shakespeare became the figure that he is now. Part of that is these enablers who made sure the folios weren't destroyed and forgotten. And then there's a fascinating process of mythmaking, which is about Englishness and Britishness in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's a classic story for your purposes, isn't it? Because there is something extraordinary going on in those plays, but then there's a whole other process that involves lots of people. That's the bit I wanted to try to unpick. There's a bad version of this book that is falsely egalitarian and implies that there is no such thing as extraordinary achievement. You're hard-pressed to look at the plays of Shakespeare and think that. So, yeah, I'm not trying to argue that great achievement doesn't exist, but I think which achievements we choose to praise and flag up often has a political dimension to it too, which is worth exploring. Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers Then there's another element added to the mix, which is the idea of the artist as mad, bad and dangerous to know. The outsider who burns brightly and sputters out early. I find that really interesting because it isn't at all the idea of the artist that you have before then, If you take someone like a Rembrandt, he was painting portraits of rich Dutch people. There was no sense that in order to market himself, he needed to be wasting away in a cupboard somewhere. It's only when you get to the Romantics that we get so into the idea that great art has this terrible cost to people. Susan Sontag wrote about tuberculosis being part of that story. Tuberculosis, which spiked as people moved into cities, has a lot of symptoms that are quite similar to all the things that people used to say about Romantic poets. And that's hard to separate out from the rise of capitalism. The idea that artists don't rely on patronage any more. They now compete in the marketplace. My brutal conclusion about a lot of the way that we talk about genius is that it's really a kind of a branding exercise. The idea that the life itself is the work of art. One of the things that's really interesting is the hunger for people who achieve things to have had interesting biographies and the slight sense of disappointment when they don't, as if we feel like we've been cheated. The book is also very much about science and also about pseudoscience – when science gets too big for its boots. Someone like Francis Galton, who used to be very famous but has been airbrushed out of history by embarrassed institutions. He was an incredible 19th-century polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin from the same very talented family. He came to be interested in the idea of genius. He was grappling with the new ideas of evolution and natural selection and selective breeding. And that gets him to eugenics, which is the idea that you can 'improve a population' by only letting the smart people have babies. From that, you get this scientific discipline of eugenics that has absolutely no human empathy behind it. And it was really widely accepted. I used to work for the New Statesman magazine, which was founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were Fabian socialists. But part of the paternalism of their socialism was they were interested in the eugenics movement. I wrote in my last book, Difficult Women, about Marie Stopes, the great contraceptive pioneer, who was also madly interested, until the [19]30s, it was a respectable scientific endeavour. Because people hadn't yet had the vivid proof about what happened when this ideology was put into practice. The book is a very odd book. It pings about from Renaissance Florence to eugenics to The Beatles. When you put them all together, you begin to realise that we have these very deep ideas about human worth and that we're always fighting over them. [ Difficult Women book review: Whirlwind tour of feminism Opens in new window ] One of the other themes is that just because somebody is good at something, it doesn't mean they're necessarily good at anything else. But that seems to be a common fallacy. Yes, the book ends with Elon Musk, who I think is a great demonstration of this. It's hard for people on the left to acknowledge that he did have great success in business because of personal qualities. He's not purely a lucky idiot who wandered into his success with Tesla and SpaceX. However, the last six months have shown that he isn't good at everything. If I may say something controversial, maybe he also is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories. What it comes back to is humility. Just because you've had great success in one area, you should still be humble about all the other areas. Humility doesn't seem to come with most of these characters. There's a really interesting question about whether or not there are certain personality traits that make you more predisposed to either be a genius or get called a genius. A certain level of narcissism, because you're okay with people looking at you and bigging you up and you accept the attention and you thrive in it. You can take two people of absolutely equal achievements and the bigger narcissist will probably get called a genius more. You quote someone saying that in this world there are actors and there are movie stars. I think that there are these people who have those magnetic qualities to them. But yeah, it's really hard to separate it out, isn't it? You can't be a genius on your own. It's not an intrinsic quality to you. It's something that gets conferred on you by other people. There's a right-wing, left-wing element to this. On the one hand an emphasis on collaboration and community. And on the other, on the primacy of individual agency and the individual casting off the bonds of the little people all around him. Because of copyright, because of the patent system, because of people wanting to make money, it becomes winner takes all. Alexander Graham Bell becomes the inventor of the telephone, even though it was much more collaborative than that. You're a writer with t he Atlantic magazine and often cover politics. Some of these themes feed into what's happening right now, such as the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I have my own reservations about some aspects of DEI, but the crudeness of that assault uses language about excellence being damped down by it. Is there a resurgence of the genius myth happening right now? Definitely. One of the things I argue in the book is that every age has its own different template of genius, which tells you a lot about that society. Our current one is the tech superman, these brilliant start-up founders who have an insight that no one else does. And you are right, they are often guys who think that they're just special people. But to go back to Elon Musk, both Tesla and SpaceX had significant public investment. SpaceX, at its lowest point, got a Nasa contract that assured its future. So, yeah, the dynamism of the private sector contributed enormously to its success, but taxpayers' money was ultimately also part of the story of what allowed it to thrive. It's really tempting for people to believe that they made it all on their own, whereas what you usually need is talent, plus luck, plus society that lets you achieve stuff. [ Elon Musk sees humanity's purpose as a facilitator of superintelligent AI. That should worry us Opens in new window ] As you point out, there are millions of people who never got that opportunity. Like you, I have reservations about some of the way that that DEI has ended up being implemented. Things like the implicit bias test don't really seem to predict very well who is actually racist in real life. But go back and look at someone as brilliant a scientist as George Washington Carver, who was black and therefore never got to go to school. Or the fact that Jewish people were excluded from lots of the Ivy Leagues. The exclusion of women from the professions for a huge amount of history. The number of bright working-class kids who never got the opportunities they deserved. So for all that we are now in this period of backlash, I think you have to say that the small efforts that we've made towards allowing more people to realise their potential come against this background of a huge amount through human history of wasted talent. I'm thinking about all the children who died in war or starved to death. There's a quote from Stephen Jay Gould about people who got very into preserving bits of Einstein's brain. He said he was less interested in the exact form of Einstein's brain than in the people who were just as brilliant but who died working in sweatshops or cotton fields. The Genius Myth is published by Penguin This is an edited extract from an episode of the Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan podcast Is there any such thing as a political genius? With Helen Lewis Listen | 39:17
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
How €325 a month changed my life – I've never taken it for granted
In August 2022, after two years of pandemic shutdowns, the arts sector in Ireland was on its knees. It hadn't been doing too well before Covid-19 , but in the face of a global virus, it all but evaporated. Government restrictions forced cinemas, theatres, performance venues, galleries and any arts-related spaces to shut down. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs , myself included. In an already struggling sector, it was the death knell for the careers of many artists and arts workers. After tireless work by the National Campaign for the Arts and Theatre Forum, former minister for arts Catherine Martin announced the introduction of a Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) scheme. This was to be a three-year research project, funded by the EU, funnelled through the Irish government. It would cost between €150,000-€200,000. Out of 8,000 eligible applicants, 2,000 were selected in an anonymised and randomised process. I was one of those 2,000 people. The BIA was an intervention to try to save a sinking ship. The severe impact of the pandemic on artists and arts workers was preceded by years of financial cuts and dwindling budgets. The sector had suffered massive cuts during the 2008 recession, and funding never made its way back up to pre-recession levels. In short, being an artist in Ireland has meant living precariously, frequently working for below minimum wage, and often working for free. Let's take a deep breath together and move in time to the fateful moment that was 2020. It's impossible for me to see this number without feeling a shudder down my spine. And yet, before it became that unforgettable year in history, for me it was one of great hope and excitement. 2020 was going to be my year. I had worked very hard for more than 20 years to build the momentum I was finally reaping. After decades of failures, successes, more failures, rejections, heartaches, near misses and almost- theres, I was staring down the barrel of a good year. No, a great year. Following a critically acclaimed, sold-out run in 2019, a play I'd written, This Beautiful Village, was going back into the Abbey Theatre for production on the main stage for one month. After that, there would be a national tour. I got a publishing deal, I signed with a new agent at a big agency in London, and This Beautiful Village won Best New Play at the Irish Theatre Awards . This glorious moment had been a long time coming for me. And then, in a heartbeat, it all disappeared … poof … into thin air. READ MORE At the time, people were at pains to assure me that my show would come back once restrictions were lifted, that all would be righted. None of these people worked in the arts or entertainment. They did not understand that in this business, when you lose your slot, it's gone. As the pandemic raged on, the Abbey changed leadership, and I was not part of their new agenda. This is how it goes in showbiz. I spent a long, long time grieving this loss. And while I was not alone – many of my peers had also lost their work – it was an intensely lonely and solitary grief. I was the only person in my family who lost everything overnight. It was also an ambiguous loss. I couldn't point to something tangible and feel its absence, because it didn't happened. It was a 'supposed to be', sliding doors moment in my life. How can you miss something you never actually had? I sank into a deep depression. I felt broken. And to top it all off, I was sick. The week of the very first shutdown, I had surgery and was diagnosed with endometriosis. In addition to grief and loss, I was in constant, severe pain. My livelihood was gone, along with my identity, my sense of self. And I got completely and utterly lost in it all. I spent two years battling with my grief, and fighting for healthcare to treat my illness. I wasn't doing well with either. I'd heard rumours that a Basic Income for the Arts scheme was coming down the line but I wasn't going to hold my breath. When an official announcement arrived, and applications opened, I put my name forward, knowing full well that my chances were slim. A lot of arts sector workers were in a bad way, and I was by no means the worst. I was able to rent a home near my daughter's school, and was able to put food on the table. Not everybody had it that good. When I received word I'd been selected, a light went on inside me. The money would be a huge boost, of course, but also, I felt seen. I felt valued. As a writer, as an artist, that's not something you feel very often. Artists expend so much energy fighting for their worth to be adequately compensated that it's very easy to lose your sense of self-worth and belief. These are not flowery words, or luxury feelings, they are fundamental to the health and wellbeing of every human being. When someone shows you that they believe in you, as the BIA did for me, it shifts you on your axis. In a society that devalues artists, yet consumes art every single day, a sliver of belief can make a seismic shift in the person who creates that art. It turns out that €325 a week can not only help with groceries and doctors' bills, it also makes you feel like you're worth something. That the creativity you contribute to the world is, in fact, meaningful. [ 'Life changing' income scheme for artists means more spend time on work and fewer suffer from depression Opens in new window ] That first BIA payment I received came at a very dark time in my life. It was a ray of light, a beacon of hope that maybe, maybe , I'd be able to keep writing. Qualified to do exactly zero else, the only path for me was forward. There was guilt, of course. Selection had been randomised but, as I've said, there had been 8,000 applications. Only 2,000 were selected. I carried a sense of shame, that there were others more deserving than me. And nobody, nobody , who was selected talked about it. It was an unspoken agreement. Don't ask, don't tell. That's how dire things have gotten for artists in Ireland. Every month, a payment would go straight into my bank account. In the three years I've been part of this scheme, I've never once taken that money for granted. In tough times, when doctors' bills skyrocketed, those payments took the edge off a sharp knife. They gave me breathing space to try to navigate writing while sick and in pain during a pandemic. Even as the dreaded restrictions began to lift, and we put distance between ourselves and the darkest days of the pandemic, that €325 continued to help with medical bills. It bought me time and space to process total career loss, chronic illness and allowed me to wedge the door open to keep writing, in whatever way I could. Every six months, there was a survey. It asked questions about my life demographics, things you would expect to answer: age, living situation, employment status, a lot of standard queries about where I was at. What I did not expect were the questions about my mental health and wellbeing. In a gentle, respectful way, it made me reflect on how I was really doing. There were the questions about care and household responsibilities. My answers to those blew my mind. It was galling to realise how much time I was spending on running a household and it was news to me to discover that with the hours I was putting in, I was, in fact, a stay-at-home mother. The purpose of the survey was to gather information, but what it did was wake me up to the domestic inequity in my household, and take a good hard look at how I was spending my time. 'How much time did you spend on leisure activities this month?' On at least three of the surveys, my answer was zero. Had it not been for this research element of the project, I'm not sure I would have ever realised this. Writing another zero next to a question about how much money I'd made from my specific art form (playwriting) forced me to have some very difficult conversations with myself. Most artists in Ireland cannot make a living from making art alone. They have to subsidise their income with jobs in other sectors, or if they're lucky, in an arts-related role. In 2024, an estimated 6.6 million tourists visited our island. They didn't all come for the Guinness. And they certainly didn't come for the weather. Our scenery is gorgeous, yes, even in the rain, but what really draws people to Ireland is our culture. Our music, our writers, our art, our theatre, our festivals, these are what make Ireland such a popular place to visit. And when they do, they spend money. Lots of it. So why are the folks that make that culture living on the breadline? The economics of culture are simple: if you build it, they will come. In their droves. They'll spend money in pubs, hotels, galleries, theatres, shops, landmarks and museums. They'll buy books and woolly hats and green hoodies and shillelaghs and Claddagh rings and records and brown bread. They'll splash the cash to immerse themselves in the full experience of the immense culture of Ireland. But culture doesn't build itself. It requires time, talent and dedication. And the people who make that culture can't do it if they can't make the rent, or they can't afford to take their sick kid to the doctor, or they can't afford a space or studio. The poetry that politicians love to quote to humanise themselves doesn't magic up out of nowhere. The TV shows you can't stop binge-watching don't make themselves. The books you read were not written by an AI bot. Someone, an artist, had to sit down at a desk, likely for years, and grind that sucker out. For a pittance. The music you love to listen to started in an artist's head and made its way out on to an instrument. That instrument costs money. The recording equipment and studio space cost more. Like it or not, art needs money, because the people who make it are human beings who need the same things as you: shelter, food and water, yes. But they also need to be valued enough to invest in. [ The Irish Times view on basic income for artists: keep it going Opens in new window ] The Basic Income for the Arts scheme was due to end in August but it has been extended until February 2026. Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport, Patrick O'Donovan TD, plans to bring proposals for a 'successor scheme' to Cabinet as part of Budget 2026. Economically, the return on a BIA scheme will pay huge dividends in the form of more art, which will grow the tourism industry which will grow the hospitality, service, and retail industries. As an investment, it's a no brainer. And those are pretty thin on the ground these days. Lisa Tierney-Keogh is a playwright and writer
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
Lorde on weight loss and body image: ‘It's this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women'
There is a note of sadness in Lorde 's voice as she thinks back to her last visit to Ireland . 'I was deep in the weeds,' she says. 'I was about a week post break-up of my long-term relationship and I was really stuck. I had sort of just come off my birth control. I was having this crazy kind of hormonal swing.' This was August 2023, and Lorde – aka the songwriter and pop star Ella Yelich-O'Connor – was headlining the All Together Now festival in Waterford. On a gorgeous blue-skied evening, her performance was typically confident and cathartic, as she moved, quicksilver-fast, between hits such as Team and Green Light, the effervescent 2017 banger that she wrote with Taylor Swift's producer Jack Antonoff . [ Lorde at All Together Now: Knockout performance underscores singer's star power Opens in new window ] Behind the scenes, though, she was reeling. She had split from her partner of nearly a decade, the Australian record executive Justin Warren, and was also working through the emotional aftershock of a brief eating disorder – subjects that she addresses frankly and viscerally on her brilliantly propulsive new album, Virgin. 'This record is a byproduct of an insane personal quest of the last couple of years,' she says. Lorde has never held back as a songwriter: her debut single, Royals, for example, from 2013, took aim at the music industry's history of prioritising commerce over art. Still, even by her own highly confessional standards, the honesty with which she talks about body image on Virgin is striking. 'I cover up all the mirrors … make a meal I won't eat,' she sings on the single What Was That, a bittersweet disco onslaught that blends euphoria and emotional torment. READ MORE Smiling softly, she explains that working on the album was part of the process of making herself whole again – and of reflecting on her issues around her weight. 'It was actually really hard for me to accept. I almost still can't accept it. I'm lucky in that it wasn't very long,' she says. 'It could definitely have been a lot worse. For me, any kind of restriction of who I am supposed to be just does not work. It completely blocked my creativity and cut me off from a life force. 'It took me quite a long time to realise that was happening. It's also like this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women. I don't think it's a unique experience I had. It felt algorithmically predestined or something.' Yelich-O'Connor was a 16-year-old kid from the Auckland suburbs when Royals became a global number one; the follow-up album, Pure Heroine, went on to sell more than five million copies. Her megastardom endures: tickets for her first stand-alone Dublin show, at the RDS this November, sold out in a heartbeat. That journey – a rollercoaster with no emergency brake – has left scars. Virgin is, in part, a reckoning with that painful transformation from everyday teenager to international chart-topper. 'You form totally differently when people are looking at you from a young age,' she says. 'I still dream probably once a month that a man is taking a photo of me with a long-lens camera. It's deep in my subconscious that someone might be looking at me and capturing something that I'm [not ready] for them to see.' But she was ready to show a vulnerable side last year when she and Charli XCX , her friend and fellow star, collaborated on a remix of Charli's song Girl, So Confusing. The crowning moment in Charli's 'Brat summer', the track was also a red-letter moment for Lorde, in that it flung the veil off a period of immense turmoil. Girl, So Confusing, which thrillingly combines Charli's Day-Glo mosh-pit energy with Lorde's elevated goth vibes, had its origins in a low-key rift between these close acquaintances. Lorde was going through her issues, and Charli was aware of a growing distance between the two. She wondered if she had said or done something. It was, as Charli sang, 'so confusing'. On the remix, which confirmed internet speculation about the identity of the 'girl' in the lyrics, Lorde sets her straight, singing, 'for the last couple years I've been at war in my body. I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back. I was trapped in the hatred.' 'It felt super scary and vulnerable for me to be expressing on that level,' Lorde says about the song, which she joined Charli XCX on stage to sing at Coachella earlier this year. 'But I had been working on Virgin for a good while at that point and was trying to make this statement about femininity that was uncompromising and very truthful.' [ Charli XCX at Malahide Castle review: High flying pop star brings Brat to Dublin but never quite achieves lift-off Opens in new window ] Lorde talks about embracing 'discomfort' as a tool for personal growth. That was point of Girl, So Confusing and the two singles she has released from Virgin, What Was That and Man of the Year, the latter a stark unpacking of her 2023 break-up. 'I'd come to this realisation as an artist that my personal discomfort is … I'm not going to let my fear stand in the way of making an expression of truth that feels really important to make,' she says. 'It might, I don't know, be helpful for other people to hear. Just doing the scary thing – I was, like, just see what happens if you do it. And [it was] so cool that I had been working on this album and then, kind of unbeknownst to me, Charli had been processing her own uncompromising womanhood, trying to become that sort of woman also. 'It felt like the right moment to test the waters of the direction of some of the subject matter I'd been writing for my own record and [meet] her vulnerability with my own vulnerability. There had to be something on the line for it to really land. It was freaky – but beautiful too. I felt something release in me when the song released.' Testing the waters included talking about her feelings about gender. She told Rolling Stone recently that she is 'in the middle gender-wise' – a point she reiterates in Hammer, her new album's opening track, singing, 'some days I'm a woman/ some days I'm a man'. (In recent public appearances she had been dressing in androgynous grey slacks and tees.) Lorde clarifies that she still identifies as a woman but has always felt a masculine energy within her, something she has historically pushed down, feeling that society would judge her. On Virgin she is learning to embrace it. If men are allowed get in touch with their feminine side, why can't women celebrate their inner masculinity? 'We have these containers, some of which are really helpful and work really well for us, and some of which just don't do the job. And for me, understanding that I am a woman, that's how I identify … I don't see that changing,' she says. 'But there's also something in me that is masculine, and I've always been that way since I was a child. There was a 'bothness' to me. And being okay with that, not being easy to be boxed up, you … It can be a bit uncomfortable to not have the tidiness. But I think that it's worth it for me to be true to myself and see what comes as a result.' Born in 1996, Lorde grew up on Auckland's North Shore, the daughter of a poet mother of Croatian heritage and a civil-engineer father of Irish extraction. When she was six she was identified as a 'gifted child', though her mother vetoed her attending a school for children of exceptional intelligence, fearing it might impact her social development. She was undoubtedly precocious: she was a keen poetry reader before her 10th birthday; at 14 she was editing her mother's master's thesis. Her musical breakthrough was the result of talent, luck and perseverance. A friend of her father's saw her perform at a school talent contest, in which she sang songs by Pixie Lott and Duffy. Impressed by her haunting voice and natural stage presence, he tipped off Universal Records, which paired her with the veteran indie musician Joel Little. Hitting it off immediately, they would work together during weekends or when O'Connor was on school holidays, capturing in music the experiences of being a teenager: the intensity of adolescent friendship, the big dreams, the anxiety about the future. All of those were poured into Royals, an overnight hit that knocked Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball off the top of the US charts and made Lorde, at 16, the youngest woman to have a US number one since Tiffany, with I Think We're Alone Now, in 1987. Virgin is in many ways a continuation of Royals and Pure Heroine, in that it is immediately catchy yet has an aura of mystery. What's new is what Lorde identifies as the record's 'visceral' quality: it feels like a body-horror movie in reverse. The cover image is a blue-tinted X-ray of a pelvis that shows a belt buckle, a trouser zip and, referencing her decision to come off birth control, a contraceptive coil. Her lyrics talk unflinchingly about women's bodies: ovulation, piercings and the cutting of the umbilical cord. It oozes emotional gore, but in a way intended to celebrate rather than shame or stigmatise. 'I felt I didn't have a document, or a piece of art, that expressed to me the visceral, intense, gross ... but also beautiful ... glory … all these elements to being in a female body. I need them all to be present. 'There's something pretty unsparing about how I do it. I believe that is a statement of value. When I was making the album I was, like, 'I don't see women's bodies, I don't see the fullness of a woman's body online…' It feels important to me to show this.' Virgin arrives four years after Lorde's previous LP, Solar Power . A departure from her more zestful pop, the album had a languid, lulling quality that threw much of her audience. It was mesmerising, but there were no bangers. Some fans are still conflicted about it. Lorde adores the record – and believes she is a stronger artist for putting out a project perceived as not having done as well as its predecessors. 'I love that album. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so proud of myself, actually, for making it, because it required a big step off the path or on to another path, maybe,' she says. 'It changed me as an artist. I'd been sort of this like golden child, and I had had this experience of having the first things that I put out being met with such a glowing response in a lot of ways. 'Having a response that was different to that was super, like, informative. It made me realise that you have got to be making work that, no matter what the response is, you just love … 100 per cent, because that response' – public adulation – 'isn't guaranteed, and it can't be what's going to fill you up.' Lorde would like to think that Virgin will be received differently – but she won't be devastated if that's not the case. 'I really remember saying that I wanted ... to feel, no matter what happens tomorrow, this is everything I want. I'm so proud of this. There's nothing I would do differently. I remember saying that to myself and totally feel like that … This could get panned, God forbid, but it could – and I would [still] love it so much.' Solar Power 'taught me a lot. I do love that album. It's beautiful and sweet.' Famous her entire adult existence, Lorde has experienced both the highs and the lows of life in the spotlight. Does she ever feel in competition with other women artists? That's how the industry often works, after all, setting women musicians against each other, making them feel that, for them to thrive, others must fail. 'I was talking to Charli about this, actually. She said, 'Yeah, we all have our fragile eras.' Sometimes you're just in your fragile era, and I think particularly when you're forming a statement, like when I'm making an album but it's early days, and I don't really have any architecture that I'm living underneath, that can absolutely be the moment where the kind of competition – or, sorry, the comparison – can creep up.' Her way of working through those doubts has been to acknowledge that there's a certain sound only she can make: to embrace the pure, heroic Lordeness of who she is and what she does. 'Honestly, the last couple years I've just been on such a mission of trying to really understand what it is that only I can do, because there's just so much value in that, and that really has shifted my mindset away from, like, 'Oh, but I can't do this as well as she can do this.' I'm, like, 'No … you're one of one. You're the number-one expert in the world at doing your thing.' She pauses and smiles again. 'It's helpful.' Virgin is released on Friday, June 27th. Lorde plays the RDS, in Dublin, on Saturday, November 22nd
