On Friday (June 26), Lorde celebrated the one-year anniversary of Virgin by unveiling 49 demos from the album’s recording sessions and penned a long, behind-the-scenes newsletter to her fans.Among the archived material uploaded to the pop star’s website are photographs, notes, artwork ideas, and the aforementioned tracks, which she calls “skeletons” of what would become Virgin.
It’s all housed on a new page of her website labeled XRAYS.“Last year we played around with making an album worth of these skeleton versions, cool composites of a few different versions,” Lorde wrote in the newsletter.“But on Sunday night, I realised true X-rays of Virgin would be realer, funnier, more revealing of crookedness and slant, less about where we ended up than celebratory of the way of travelling, the repetitions, the acne, the journey.
Like Eric said, truly you is beautiful.It’s how I’m trying to live.”Lorde also gave a broad overview of what her life looked like at the time of working on Virgin and the struggles she went through, including an eating disorder, a diagnosis of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, and a breakup.
“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.”Read Lorde’s full essay below:...