Lorde

“I started working on this album in May, 2014, when I took a train from LA to Portland with two friends. We left at 10 AM, and we ate, drank, saw the California coast and snow in southern Oregon, got cabin fever, and barely slept over the next 30 hours, but I made a lot of music, including the initial demos for this album. The Lorde and Kanye combination is especially attractive to me in part because they’ve both expressed mutual admiration for each other despite having such disparate styles, but then in listening to each, realizing they do have thematic overlaps. My hope with this album was to bring out the elements of each that otherwise goes unrecognized in each of their original works. Also, I really love both artists — Lorde for her ability to capture feelings and sentiments that I can vividly remember having as a teenager, and Kanye for continuing to reinvent his style and shape the direction of the genre with each album. Each are unmistakably themselves — you wouldn’t confuse their work for someone else’s. Besides the train ride, I made pieces of this album across coffee shops and friends’ apartments in San Francisco, Portland, New York, Kauai and Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Huge thanks to all my friends and family who listened to demos, entertained incessant conversations about minutiae of the album, and dealt with me on little sleep — I truly appreciate it. It’s already 4:00am and while writing this sort of rambling about