ロードのソングライティングに影響を与えた8冊の本

On the cusp of her 20th birthday, Lorde shared a post to Facebook titled A Note from the Desk of a Newborn Adult. The text was a meditation on the sparkling ephemerality of adolescence and the uncertain promise of what lay ahead as she announced her second album, Melodrama. While whittled with the millennial charm of a few well-placed emojis, the note revealed something already latent in her music: Lorde is, above all, a writer.

And behind every good writer is a reader. The pop saviour has long been vocal about her love of books. Over the years, she has continued to reveal her influences, whether in periodic newsletters, glimpsed in the corners of poolside Instagram stories, or dropped into interviews across her career. Fans have tracked her reading habits in curated lists, Reddit threads and Lorde’s Book Club, an Instagram page devoted to cataloguing her reads.

With her mother, Sonya Yelich, a poet, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that Lorde was imbued with a writer’s wit. “My mum influenced my lyrical style by always buying me books. She’d give me a mixture of kid and adult books too; there weren’t really any books I wasn’t allowed to read,” she recalled in an interview. As she began writing songs, she learned how to “put words together” by reading short fiction, discovering the rhythms and structures that would eventually inform her own songwriting.

So, from Annie Ernaux to Guy Debord, we’ve sifted through the reading list for MA Lorde Lit Studies, and compiled a cheat sheet.

Jia Tolentino’s New York Times bestseller Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) unfolds across nine essays, each exploring the dread of the digital age – a world where the pressure to endlessly optimise yourself is relentless, and the result is often paralysis rather than progress. According to the Instagram account @lordesbookclub, “Mood Ring”, from Lorde’s third studio album Solar Power, was inspired by one of Tolentino’s essays from the book, which criticises “a society that consistently sells the idea of a woman who must be in a constant process of self-improvement.” You can see the writer’s influence in the song, which has been described as a ‘satirical take on white spirituality’, and those who are always in the pursuit of vaguely bettering themselves. (HD)

“The themes are always the same – a return to innocence, the mysteries of the blood, an itch for the transcendental.” Fans rushed to decode Lorde’s Instagram bio, assigning albums to each phrase, only to discover that the line originates in Joan Didion’s 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. During her 2021 Solar Power tour, the quote was also illuminated onto screens alongside a magical prelude to the track “Supercut.” Just as Didion examines youth, corporeality and the longing for something beyond the everyday, Lorde’s lyrics explore the same preoccupations – heartbreak, the grief that comes with the end of adolescence, and the muddled passage into adulthood that follows. (TM)

Throughout the last year of Lorde reemerging into the spotlight, she has spoken multiple times about the influence of acclaimed French writer Annie Ernaux during this stage of her career. In her DA-Zed Guide To Being video, she notes that The Years was the first book she read by the author. Often considered one of her most experimental works, it reimagines the form of a traditional memoir: instead of focusing only on her own personal story, Ernaux writes in a collective voice, weaving her individual experiences into the broader fabric of postwar French society. The book spans from the 1940s to the early 2000s, moving through eras of political upheaval and technological change, while also reflecting on memory, ageing and the passage of time. On Virgin, Lorde’s own personal anecdotes are highlighted, but it’s really her ability to capture collective generational experiences in a no-nonsense sort of way (see songs like “Shapeshifter” and “Broken Glass”) that shows the impact of Ernaux’s work for this project. (HJ)

Lorde posted a picture of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint on her newsletter in 2021. The book reconsiders the term “freedom”, tracing its complexities across four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. Drawing on theory, culture and lived experience, Nelson asks how freedom can be practised in relation to others, where care, conflict and interdependence shape what it means to live together. Lorde is constantly grappling with the idea of freedom, in all her albums and in every stage of her life. However, on Virgin, particularly in the track “Clearblue”, she is explicit about it, as she sings about pregnancy, independence and being “nobody’s daughter”. (HJ)

Many of the books Lorde has spoken about reading have concerned mother-daughter relationships, which is a theme she has explored in her own work (most explicitly in Virgin’s “Favourite Daughter”). One of the best of them is My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, a very funny and at times excruciating novel about a weekend visit between the narrator and her mother, Hen – a tragic-comic figure who is a source of embarrassment and frustration to her daughter (it’s hard not to wince when she slips into a “Italian restaurant owner accent” while attempting to seduce a married man). Not all that much happens in My Phantoms, and there is little in the way of catharsis, but Riley is a master at probing the difficulties of human relationships and why it can be so difficult to connect – much like Lorde herself! (JG)

Before she took a step back from social media in 2018, Lorde tweeted about reading A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a 1977 book by French philosopher Roland Barthes, which ought to be a foundational text for anyone who considers themselves a yearner. What makes A Lover’s Discourse is that it’s ostensibly an academic work on the language and symbols of romantic love, but it reads like a series of thinly disguised diary entries from someone who is really going through it – post-structuralism has never been more melancholy or Tumblr-ready. In one of the more famous passages, Barthes writes, “Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.” Tea! (JG)

Ali Smith, a Scottish novelist known for her inventive and lyrical prose, wrote the Seasonal Quartet – Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer – a cycle of novels responding to contemporary events while drawing on themes of art and nature. 2016’s Autumn, often called the first great Brexit novel, captures a nation in flux, mixing political disillusionment with sharp wit and a belief in the endurance of creativity. 2017’s Winter, by contrast, is colder and more austere, depicting fractured families and frozen spaces that still suggest that even in the bleakest months, renewal is possible.

Smith uses the seasons not just as settings but as emotional and political metaphors, reflecting cycles of division, despair, resilience and rebirth. To those familiar with Lorde’s full discography, the idea of mixing natural elements with inner states of being has been present throughout her career. The gleaming sunlight and tides in Solar Power embody warmth, freedom and nostalgia, while the storms and nocturnal moods of Melodrama channel intensity and chaos. Similar to how Smith translates the essence of autumn or winter into a shared and individual understanding, Lorde converts the sensation of weather into auditory experiences, making seasons into emotional atmospheres her listeners can inhabit. (HD)

Lorde referenced this – another work of French philosophy – on Instagram in 2018. At first glance, the influence on her work is less obvious than some of the other books she’s spoken about as favourites (many of which deal in intimate relationships of various kinds), but it makes sense considering where she was in her career. In The Society Of the Spectacle, Guy Debord offers a wide-ranging critique of how social life has been degraded by mass media and consumerism, ideas which are echoed in Solar Power’s themes of retreat from celebrity culture and social media. We just used a oujia board to communicate with Debord in heaven and he said that, while he’s more of a Melodrama guy, he considers her third album interesting and ambitious. (JG)

On the cusp of her 20th birthday, Lorde shared a post to Facebook titled A Note from the Desk of a Newborn Adult. The text was a meditation on the sparkling ephemerality of adolescence and the uncertain promise of what lay ahead as she announced her second album, Melodrama. While whittled with the millennial charm of a few well-placed emojis, the note revealed something already latent in her music: Lorde is, above all, a writer.

And behind every good writer is a reader. The pop saviour has long been vocal about her love of books. Over the years, she has continued to reveal her influences, whether in periodic newsletters, glimpsed in the corners of poolside Instagram stories, or dropped into interviews across her career. Fans have tracked her reading habits in curated lists, Reddit threads and Lorde’s Book Club, an Instagram page devoted to cataloguing her reads.

With her mother, Sonya Yelich, a poet, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that Lorde was imbued with a writer’s wit. “My mum influenced my lyrical style by always buying me books. She’d give me a mixture of kid and adult books too; there weren’t really any books I wasn’t allowed to read,” she recalled in an interview. As she began writing songs, she learned how to “put words together” by reading short fiction, discovering the rhythms and structures that would eventually inform her own songwriting.

So, from Annie Ernaux to Guy Debord, we’ve sifted through the reading list for MA Lorde Lit Studies, and compiled a cheat sheet.

Jia Tolentino’s New York Times bestseller Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) unfolds across nine essays, each exploring the dread of the digital age – a world where the pressure to endlessly optimise yourself is relentless, and the result is often paralysis rather than progress. According to the Instagram account @lordesbookclub, “Mood Ring”, from Lorde’s third studio album Solar Power, was inspired by one of Tolentino’s essays from the book, which criticises “a society that consistently sells the idea of a woman who must be in a constant process of self-improvement.” You can see the writer’s influence in the song, which has been described as a ‘satirical take on white spirituality’, and those who are always in the pursuit of vaguely bettering themselves. (HD)

“The themes are always the same – a return to innocence, the mysteries of the blood, an itch for the transcendental.” Fans rushed to decode Lorde’s Instagram bio, assigning albums to each phrase, only to discover that the line originates in Joan Didion’s 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. During her 2021 Solar Power tour, the quote was also illuminated onto screens alongside a magical prelude to the track “Supercut.” Just as Didion examines youth, corporeality and the longing for something beyond the everyday, Lorde’s lyrics explore the same preoccupations – heartbreak, the grief that comes with the end of adolescence, and the muddled passage into adulthood that follows. (TM)

Throughout the last year of Lorde reemerging into the spotlight, she has spoken multiple times about the influence of acclaimed French writer Annie Ernaux during this stage of her career. In her DA-Zed Guide To Being video, she notes that The Years was the first book she read by the author. Often considered one of her most experimental works, it reimagines the form of a traditional memoir: instead of focusing only on her own personal story, Ernaux writes in a collective voice, weaving her individual experiences into the broader fabric of postwar French society. The book spans from the 1940s to the early 2000s, moving through eras of political upheaval and technological change, while also reflecting on memory, ageing and the passage of time. On Virgin, Lorde’s own personal anecdotes are highlighted, but it’s really her ability to capture collective generational experiences in a no-nonsense sort of way (see songs like “Shapeshifter” and “Broken Glass”) that shows the impact of Ernaux’s work for this project. (HJ)

Lorde posted a picture of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint on her newsletter in 2021. The book reconsiders the term “freedom”, tracing its complexities across four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. Drawing on theory, culture and lived experience, Nelson asks how freedom can be practised in relation to others, where care, conflict and interdependence shape what it means to live together. Lorde is constantly grappling with the idea of freedom, in all her albums and in every stage of her life. However, on Virgin, particularly in the track “Clearblue”, she is explicit about it, as she sings about pregnancy, independence and being “nobody’s daughter”. (HJ)

Many of the books Lorde has spoken about reading have concerned mother-daughter relationships, which is a theme she has explored in her own work (most explicitly in Virgin’s “Favourite Daughter”). One of the best of them is My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, a very funny and at times excruciating novel about a weekend visit between the narrator and her mother, Hen – a tragic-comic figure who is a source of embarrassment and frustration to her daughter (it’s hard not to wince when she slips into a “Italian restaurant owner accent” while attempting to seduce a married man). Not all that much happens in My Phantoms, and there is little in the way of catharsis, but Riley is a master at probing the difficulties of human relationships and why it can be so difficult to connect – much like Lorde herself! (JG)

Before she took a step back from social media in 2018, Lorde tweeted about reading A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a 1977 book by French philosopher Roland Barthes, which ought to be a foundational text for anyone who considers themselves a yearner. What makes A Lover’s Discourse is that it’s ostensibly an academic work on the language and symbols of romantic love, but it reads like a series of thinly disguised diary entries from someone who is really going through it – post-structuralism has never been more melancholy or Tumblr-ready. In one of the more famous passages, Barthes writes, “Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.” Tea! (JG)

Ali Smith, a Scottish novelist known for her inventive and lyrical prose, wrote the Seasonal Quartet – Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer – a cycle of novels responding to contemporary events while drawing on themes of art and nature. 2016’s Autumn, often called the first great Brexit novel, captures a nation in flux, mixing political disillusionment with sharp wit and a belief in the endurance of creativity. 2017’s Winter, by contrast, is colder and more austere, depicting fractured families and frozen spaces that still suggest that even in the bleakest months, renewal is possible.

Smith uses the seasons not just as settings but as emotional and political metaphors, reflecting cycles of division, despair, resilience and rebirth. To those familiar with Lorde’s full discography, the idea of mixing natural elements with inner states of being has been present throughout her career. The gleaming sunlight and tides in Solar Power embody warmth, freedom and nostalgia, while the storms and nocturnal moods of Melodrama channel intensity and chaos. Similar to how Smith translates the essence of autumn or winter into a shared and individual understanding, Lorde converts the sensation of weather into auditory experiences, making seasons into emotional atmospheres her listeners can inhabit. (HD)

Lorde referenced this – another work of French philosophy – on Instagram in 2018. At first glance, the influence on her work is less obvious than some of the other books she’s spoken about as favourites (many of which deal in intimate relationships of various kinds), but it makes sense considering where she was in her career. In The Society Of the Spectacle, Guy Debord offers a wide-ranging critique of how social life has been degraded by mass media and consumerism, ideas which are echoed in Solar Power’s themes of retreat from celebrity culture and social media. We just used a oujia board to communicate with Debord in heaven and he said that, while he’s more of a Melodrama guy, he considers her third album interesting and ambitious. (JG)