Lorde turned to MDMA to overcome stage fright
The 'Royals' hitmaker has suffered from debilitating nerves since she was a child but underwent numerous sessions between 2022 and 2024 where she would take psychedelic drugs in a supervised setting and they left her feeling much more free and at ease with exploring new cities before her shows instead of dreading a panic attack in her hotel room.
She told Rolling Stone magazine: 'I was touring without stage fright for the first time."
Freed from her fears, Lorde found she was able to connect with her audience in a new way.
She said: '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. It made me realise how much I love and kind of need that very deep, visceral response to feel my music.'
The 28-year-old star also found the psychedelic treatments helped improve her relationship with her body, having been in the grips of an eating disorder.
She said of a realisation she had: '[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.' I understood the whole spectrum of it and began to enjoy the complexity and ruggedness.'
Lorde recalled the night before she released her 2021 album 'Solar Power' and how she was consumed with how she never felt thin enough.
She said: '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.'
Months later, ahead of the North American leg of her 'Solar Power' tour, Lorde wrote an email newsletter to her fans explaining the shows had "set so much right" inside her but she was still consumed by counting calories.
She said: 'I don't know how those two things can be true: that I'm having this really amazing, rich experience of playing the shows and meeting these kids, and [yet] I'm also looking at the pictures afterward and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy, thinking it was so unforgivable what I had allowed it to become."
These days, Lorde has a healthier relationship with food and her body and it has helped her regain her focus on her music.
She said: 'Once I stopped doing that, I had all this energy for making stuff.
'I could see that if I cut that cord, maybe I would get something back that I needed to do my work. And it was totally true. Got it all back, and way more.'
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