Lorde says MDMA and psilocybin therapy helped her kick long-time stage fright and heal her body image issues — all while transforming how she connects to her fans.
The Royals singer revealed to Rolling Stone that between 2022 and 2024, she took part in multiple supervised psychedelic sessions to deal with crippling anxiety she'd battled since childhood.
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"I was touring without stage fright for the first time," Lorde said. She explained that the drugs helped her stop isolating herself in hotel rooms before performances and allowed her to actually explore new cities. Onstage, she started to feel a deeper emotional pull with her audience.
"I would play 'Supercut,' and all of a sudden there was a hook around my guts and everyone in the room was having the same feeling, [like] there'd been a huge pressure change," she said. "It made me realise how much I love and kind of need that very deep, visceral response to feel my music."
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The 28-year-old also said the treatments helped her accept her body after years of struggling with an eating disorder. A breakthrough moment came when she realized: "[I've] been in the same body [my] whole life. I understood it. I was like, 'These arms climbed the jungle gym. And they held an award on a TV show.'"
Lorde recalled starving herself the night before her 2021 album Solar Power dropped. "I felt so hungry and so weak. I was on TV [that] morning, and I didn't eat because I wanted my tummy to be small in the dress. It was just this sucking of a life force or something," she said.
Later, even after performing on the North American leg of her tour, she admitted the calorie counting never really stopped. "I'm also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy," she said. "Thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become."
Now, she says things have changed. "Once I stopped doing that, I had all this energy for making stuff," Lorde said. "Got it all back, and way more."
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