Daniel Kreps
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Lorde Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images 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.”
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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.)
