Lorde's Greatest Muse Is The F Train

Random subway celebrity sightings are a dime a dozen in this city, whether it's Tom Hanks Hankspreading on the 1 train, Michael Cera rubbing his shoes all over the pole, or Dame Helen Mirren showing exemplary subway etiquette on the R train. There are a few exceptional celebrities though, the ones every New Yorker thinks they've ridden with, like Kevin Bacon or Jake Gyllenhaal, who has been cursed to eat bagels off the floor of the subway for eternity. We are proud to formally declare Lorde an exceptional subway celebrity, but because she is the inverse of Bacon and Gyllenhaal: you've probably ridden with her on the subway without even realizing it.

In the buildup to the release of her sophomore album Melodrama, Lorde has been on a charm offensive regaling various publications with tales of her subway exploits. This weekend, she'll appear on an episode of CBS Sunday Morning, where she'll be riding the train with Anthony Mason. She told him much of the album was written while riding the F train. "I thanked the subway in my album notes. Because I wouldn’t have been able to make the record without it," Lorde says in the segment. "I found it such an amazing space to kind of be around people.”

In May, she told Rolling Stone about her habits while writing the album:

Outside the studio, Lorde often kept to herself. She stayed in a "bizarre businessman hotel - just me and conferences," she says. "In a lot of ways I felt like a little monk, drifting down into the subway, being very solitary and just thinking about the music all the time and not really socializing very much. Every once in a while, a sweet little NYU student would come up to me and say some lovely thing, but really I felt like I was able to lose touch with myself as a person of note, which is a really valuable thing. By the end, this part of my life, this part that we're doing right now, all of this felt very abstract."

The most extensive information about Lorde's subway habits came in a NY Times Magazine cover story, which included a lot of quotes about how much she enjoys not being recognized in public ("No one cares about me."):

We pushed through the service exit, walked along empty streets and boarded an uptown 1 train. While making Melodrama, Lorde took lots of subway rides, auditioning rough mixes of songs on cheap earbuds, which helped give her a sense of how the music would sound in daily life. As we rumbled northward, her face was in full fluorescent light, and I wondered if people ever bothered her during these rides. “Nobody recognizes me,” she said. When Lorde does spot someone spotting her, she went on, her move is to smile, place a finger to her lips and mouth a conspiratorial shh. Her thinking is that this gesture, warm and direct in its appeal, will pre-empt any further encounter — “and it usually does.”

There's also this little scene, which took place at a diner near Columbus Circle called the Flame. Suffice to say, not only have you unknowingly travelled with Lorde on the subway—she's probably jotted down something you said (assuming you said something interesting):

Part of the reason Lorde likes traveling unnoticed in New York is that she enjoys paying close attention to strangers’ conversations. “I’ll overhear a phrase and roll it around in my mind for hours,” she said. Sometimes it isn’t a phrase that ensnares her but a tableau. At one point during our meal, she broke off midsentence and drew my gaze to an older couple one table over. The man, who had a plastic ballpoint pen clipped to his belt, was holding up a takeout box. His companion was slowly filling it with uneaten French fries from her plate, one tiny fork-nudge at a time. Neither spoke, but there were soft, birdlike squeaks as the china rubbed against the plastic foam. Lorde looked back at me and put a hand to her heart.

And in case you're wondering: yes, Lorde is fully aware that the F train is now the poster child for our never-ending waking infrastructure nightmare. Love is love.

Now I just want to know whether her stance on the other Subway is still as strong as it once was.

[h/t Stereogum]