- Music
- 21 May 14
In an interview set up by The New York Times the 'Royals' singer and Bright Eyes' frontman discuss their similarities in writing and expressing the complications of youth.
While at first glance the pair may seem an odd couple, the two songwriter's share a mutual expect for each other's writing styles and music. In the interview they discuss the path of being a young songwriter that Oberst and Bright Eyes walked down a decade ago and Lordes follows today.
The two artists discuss the level of autobiography found in their music:
Q. Especially as young songwriters, people assume everything you write is autobiographical, which isn’t always true. How do you deal with that?
LORDE I reckon 85 percent of what I write is autobiographical. I’ll tweak stuff if I don’t think it sounds good in the story — my friends have been like, I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen in that way. But I struggle with being too honest. I remember writing a song when I was like 15, which was on my first EP, and it had the line, “my mother’s love is choking me,” because I’d had this fight with my mum ...
OBERST Did that bum her out?
Advertisement
LORDE Yeah, it’s the one thing that she hears and she always feels kind of sad about. Even though I told her so many times, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry! It’s intense, dealing with that sort of stuff, but always wanting to just be straight up and express exactly what you were feeling.
OBERST A lot of times I don’t even know what I’m writing about until later and then I’m like, oh. It’s a delayed effect.
The full interview can be found here