Lorde’s Random Notes App Scribblings Are Deeply Relatable
Because even popstars write random shit in their phones in the middle of the night.
The Notes App is the sieve of the iPhone, catching everything from shopping lists to middle-of-the-night musings. It’s not just the conduit for contemporary internet apologies — it’s a miasma of random pieces of thought.
Ahead of the release of her new album, Solar Power, of which the title track has already dropped, Lorde shared her own Notes App scribblings to the subscribers of her email newsletter.
Lorde ostensibly shared the content to give an insight into her creative process, noting that most singer-songwriters rely on the Notes App like a crutch. “Notes has become sort of this mythical zone for the modern songwriter, as with Voice Memos, and it’s true — we are all writing every fucking song using these two applications,” Lorde wrote as way of introduction to the scribblings.
“When I think about any romantic notions I may have had as a kid of writing my songs elegantly in a notebook with pen, I laugh. The truth is, my written hand is really slow. Typing is the fastest I can get something out, and speed is key.”
But the writings don’t just give an insight into Lorde the singer-songwriter — they also give an insight into Lorde the human being, detailing her hopes and aspirations, her dreams and her wants. They’re like miniature diary entries, rattled off before her brain has time to process the full implication of the thought. So they contain everything from desires for romantic love, to her thoughts about her home country, New Zealand.
Basically, they’re all over the place, and that’s precisely what makes them special. Turns out it’s not just us lay folk who use our phone to catch every last thought that falls out of our brain — popstars do too.
Read the Notes in full here:
