Lorde made her past two albums with Jack Antonoff, whom she calls a “positive, supportive collaborator,” but it was time to shake things up. “I’m very vibes-based,” she says. “I just have to trust when my intuition says to keep moving.”
Her primary collaborator on Virgin was producer and writer Jim-E Stack, who has worked with Bon Iver and Danielle Haim. Lorde reached out to him in early 2022, while she was in Los Angeles rehearsing for the Solar Power tour. They met at Sunset Tower and talked about being Drake fans as teens and life in general. “I had always seen her as an outlier pop star, this A-tier pop star, who had the success and accolades that came with that but didn’t play the game,” Stack says. “I just admired her tremendously.”
During their first sessions together that year, the pair wrote one song that would end up on Virgin, but nothing else was sticking just yet. It was taking her longer than she hoped to figure out what she was trying to make. While in London, she isolated herself outside of her remaining tour dates, simmering in the end of her relationship. She also read, a lot.
Of the 60 or so books she shipped from New York to London, most were about the body, specifically pregnancy. The books on motherhood built upon her interests in the female body and the way it can change in all its glory and gore: Angela Garbes’ Essential Labor, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight. When she read novels, she turned mostly to writers like Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner — all authors who blend fiction with intense autobiographical honesty, a familiar mode for the singer. She started having “really amazing dreams,” collecting them in a now-full dream journal. She befriended “all these amazing older woman artists” who brought her to museums and galleries. She became a fan of Martin Wong, a Chinese American painter whose works explore racial identities and queerness. She says his work “sliced” her.
All the while, she waited for her next album to reveal itself to her: “Nothing was calling me, [but] I knew it would call.” {read}