Lorde ‘hits the early’ as her arena tour stops in Toronto

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An Air Canada Centre publicist sent out an email on the afternoon of Lorde’s concert in Toronto on Thursday, telling journalists and photographers about a change in the set time. Closer to the show, another email was issued notifying everyone that the times had changed yet again, with the main set moved up by 15 minutes. “Looks like Lorde hits the early,” the publicist wrote. And isn’t that the truth: “Lorde hits the early.”

Lorde is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, the New Zealand pop star next door. In 2013, as a teenager, she scored a No. 1 hit with Royals, a catchy anthem and wry comment on hip-hop styled hedonism: “But every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom / Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room.”

With her debut album, Pure Heroine, Lorde found an instant audience. Young women in particular bonded with the disaffected attitude, suburban pride and self-assured and self-aware angst against the machine. The song Royals itself was something of a campaign speech, all about a different kind of buzz and a lux that “ain’t for us.”

And, thus, the young woman who mono-named herself lord with an ‘e’ and impishly proposed “let me be your ruler” became the people’s pop queen.

On stage at Air Canada Centre, with the 2017 follow-up album Melodrama under her belt, Lorde is every bit the commoner’s dream and modest ruler-servant. Polished and mature beyond her 21 years, she lavishes praise on the audience and humbly notes the size of the venue. “I’m still at the point in my life and career that this is a milestone for me,” she tells the crowd.

Later she says she is more used to playing “broom closets” than arenas. To be clear, on her last visit here Lorde played the Danforth Music Hall, capacity 1,500, which isn’t exactly small beginnings.

Still, while audiences are accustomed to flattery, perhaps Lorde’s gushing praise for Toronto was genuine. The unsold tickets and empty seats of previous tour stops are an indication that Lorde’s promotion to arenas was premature. An announced sold-out crowd in Toronto might very well have felt like the “homecoming” Lorde suggested it was.

Musically, Lorde sets herself apart, if only slightly. It all sounds in fashion – trap-synth trippiness, brooding Lana Del Rey-like balladry and swaggering, danceable electro-pop – but it’s not carbon-copy fare. While the production and songwriting have enough factory-farmed sweetness to keep it in the mainstream, there’s just enough quirks to avoid sameness.

Lyrically, her themes are relatable (breakups, young awkwardness), while other times she touches on her status as a pop star. “Sometimes I wake up in a different bedroom,” Lorde sings on Green Light. “I whisper things, the city sings ’em back to you.” Indeed, the ACC audience crooned along with its queen.

On Writer in the Dark, Lorde sings about someone jealous of her fandom: “Stood on my chest and kept me down, hated hearing my name on the lips of a crowd.” The ACC crowd, at least the screaming people in Section 107, was overwhelmed by her.

“I’m going to break down,” says a female crowd member.

From another, “Oh my god, I am dying.”

And, from a third, at the end of the concert, “I can’t even.”

Lorde’s outsider status and sudden, early rise to fame recalls the story of Alanis Nadine Morissette, a glorious Canadian freak whose alt-rock angst was a windstorm in the 1990s. As a teenaged dance-pop star, Morissette was compared to other glitz-and-gum girls of the era. In 1995, with the help of song doctor Glen Ballard, she re-appeared as a brash, mature songwriter with Jagged Little Pill. The album, nominated for nine Grammy Awards, was full of hits, gall and generational galvanization.

Likewise, Lorde was groomed by a major label from a young age. She rebelled against it, and, with help from songwriter-producers, has gained significant popularity. Lorde’s Royals broke Morissette’s record (with You Oughta Know) for the longest reign at the top of Billboard’s Alternative chart by a female singer.

It was a good run for Morissette, who no longer makes hit records. At the ACC, Lorde offers Liability, a minor-key ballad that borrows a chord progression from Bowie’s All the Young Dudes, a song about youthful despair that was a hit for Mott the Hoople in 1972. “The truth is I am a toy that people enjoy,” Lorde sings, “til all of the tricks don’t work anymore.”

Lorde, like Morissette, “hit the early.” It gets late quick, though. The pop music industry checks its watch obsessively, and Lorde, as others before her, is on the clock.