Lorde Concert Review SDCC

By Alison Fortune

Lorde’s first album, Pure Heroine, debuted in 2013. When it released, I was a senior in high school and, at age 17, one year older than the singer. It was the first time in my life an artist born after me had shot to stardom, and I marveled that someone who was my peer could be both so successful and so talented. Listening to “Ribs” and hearing her sing “It drives you crazy, getting old,” both of us only in the second decade of our lives, felt simultaneously comic and cosmic. I knew we were still so young, but I could still feel myself slipping through experiences I would never be able to return to.

​12 years after that debut album release, I saw Lorde on the last stop and penultimate night of her Ultrasound tour. Playing in Brooklyn’s Barclays Arena to a crowd of 19,000, I was surprised by how many younger faces I saw in the audience. Sometimes we think of the things we love as fixed in the time we found them, inaccessible to those who follow us. But the arena was dotted with people who’d come of age with Lorde at many different stages in her career. 

Performing largely from her latest album, Virgin (she played every single track), she also incorporated many songs from Pure Heroine, creating an easy contrast between these two different works. In her early song, “Team,” she assures the listener that “we sure know how to run things:” but in “Hammer,” the opening track from both Virgin and the concert itself, she tells us that she’s “ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.” As she moved across the stage, slipping in and out of these different moments from her career, I was reminded of one of Bob Dylan’s lyrics that always stuck with me: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” The sixteen year old songwriter who had impressed me so much with her seemingly advanced wisdom had grown up to be someone who had just as much growing left to do as I did. 

​I like my experiences spoiler free, so I hadn’t engaged with any content about the previous nights of the tour. However, as Lorde disappeared from the main stage for the encore, I noticed the other concertgoers in the rows adjacent to mine had rushed to a very small barricaded platform set up in front of the sound console. Even without prior knowledge, I can feel which way the wind is blowing. I grabbed my friend’s hand and dragged her as close to the barricade as we could get. When Lorde climbed the staircase to take her spot at this miniature secondary stage, we were suddenly within ten feet of her.

​She closed out the show with “Ribs.” As she reached her hand into the projected light above her head, it felt like she was dipping her fingers into something divine. When she breathed out “It feels so scary, getting old,” I felt the weight of the 12 years that had passed between the first time I heard her sing those words and this moment. It has been scary, getting old. She and I had both moved from city to city, ended relationships, made art we felt proud of: in other words, grown up. So much of that time has been fraught and painful. But during the bridge, as she sang “You’re the only friend I need,” my friend and I reached out and held each other’s faces in our hands as we screamed the lyrics into each other’s mouths. Here I was, with a person I had no idea existed when this song first came out, someone now instrumental to who I’ve grown into. Maybe it’s scary, getting old; but it’s also a gift to find people with whom we can “laugh until our ribs get tough.” Lorde knows what it means to grow up over and over again, and brought those feelings to all of us in the arena that night.