Lorde has opened up about her gender identity in a candid new interview with Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos, offering insights into how she currently views herself and her evolving expression of gender.
In the feature, Spanos notes that the lyrics to the opening track of Lorde’s upcoming album Virgin include the line: “Some days I’m a woman / Some days I’m a man.” The interviewer asks how these lyrics connect to Lorde’s personal life and identity.
“I ask her how she identifies now, what it means and what’s changed,” writes Spanos. “[Chappell Roan] asked me this,” Lorde recalls, referencing a conversation with fellow artist and close friend Chappell Roan. “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
Though Lorde still identifies as a cis woman and continues using she/her pronouns, she describes herself as feeling “in the middle gender-wise,” reflecting a more fluid experience. “In some ways, she feels like her teenage self again, back when her friends were mostly boys and there was a looseness in how she dressed and acted,” the article explains.
Lorde also shared a pivotal moment with producer and collaborator Jim-E Stack that helped shape her thinking around gender identity. In 2023, while shopping at New York’s C’H’C’M’ store, she tried on a pair of men’s jeans and sent a picture to Stack for his input.
“He was like, ‘I want to see the you that’s in this picture represented in the music,’” Lorde says. “This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all.”
Lorde’s fourth studio album, Virgin, is set to be released on June 27 and will be followed by a global tour.
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