Lorde marked the one-year anniversary of Virgin by sharing nearly 50 demos from the album, as well as shared a personal note about the making of the LP.
“On Sunday night I was putting my clothes away and realized Virgin had been out for almost a year,” Lorde wrote in her newsletter to fans.
“I decided something had to be done about that. To be honest I haven’t really known how to talk about Virgin since it came out. I’d thought I was accustomed and even a bit desensitized to marketing and commodifying my feelings at this point in my life, but sharing Virgin felt raw and exposing in a new way.* I interviewed poorly, couldn’t write here, haven’t posted much. I think I needed to just be quiet for a while. It also makes sense to me that such physical work would resist being trapped with language. But some time has passed, and I wanna try to find the words.”
In the newsletter, Lorde wrote about her personal struggles during the time of Virgin, including a breakup, an eating disorder, and a diagnosis of PMDD [Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder]. “I concentrated on singing to myself the way I needed to be sung to,” she wrote. “Gradually I put music and language to old stories I had been scared to tell. I purged them out of me and felt lighter. Living in these songs had an incantatory effect. I felt myself change.”
At a newly launched “XRAYS” page on her official website — in addition to photographs, notes, artwork ideas and more from the Virgin era — Lorde shared 49 “skeletons” of what would become the Virgin songs. (Although Lorde previously hinted that some of her favorite Virgin-era songs didn’t make the final track list, those tracks weren’t included in the XRAYS demos.)
“Last year we played around with making an album worth of these skeleton versions, cool composites of a few different versions,” Lorde wrote. “But on Sunday night, I realized true X-rays of Virgin would be realer, funnier, more revealing of crookedness and slant.”
“Making an album is an absurd act,” she continued in the newsletter. “The self absorption and belief required make you tough to be around. You disappear completely into your own world, always sort of muttering, constantly on the edge of a breakthrough. The work is really bad for a long time, you’re have to live in the wrongness and hack your way out. Sometimes the discomfort and mundanity are hard to see past, but every single day making Virgin was a total gift.”
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