Lorde Says She's 'Not Built for the Pop Star Life' and Finds the Public Eye to Be 'Very Intense'

Though Lorde loves her job — she's not so sure she's "the man" for it.

In Vogue's October cover story interview released Wednesday, the New Zealand singer opened up about her personal difficulties that come with pop stardom — and said she's "not built for the pop star life."

"I'm great at my job, but I'm not sure I'm the man for the job. I'm a highly sensitive person. I'm not built for pop star life," Lorde, 24, told the magazine. "To have a public-facing existence is something I find really intense and is something I'm not good at. That natural charisma is not what I have. I have the brain in the jar."

However, the singer added that over the years she managed to find the balance that works best for her.

"For whatever reason people have allowed me to say, okay, I'm going to come and do the thing— do the shoot, do the red carpet, speak to the journalists, put the music out — and when I've done it to the point of total exhaustion, when I have completely quenched that thirst — I'm going to go home, and you're not going to see me for two or three or four years," Lorde said.

"I'll be doing the other thing, which is being there for every single birthday and dinner party and cooking every single meal and going on every single walk and taking every single bath. And when I've done that, and I'm like, all right, that's enough of that for a little while, I'll come back again," she continued.

The singer also opened up about her journey to self-love — beginning from when she was 16 years old and released "Royals" — to now, following the release of her latest album Solar Power — which she says made her feel "young for the first time."

"When I said I felt young for the first time—it meant feeling like I'm confident enough to put my butt out there. I wouldn't have been able to do that as a teenager," she explained. "When you're really famous as a young person, feelings get magnified. At that time, people were discussing my body on Twitter, and the natural response was to shrink away from it. Now I have a sense of my worth and my power — and my body is awesome, for one thing. But it's also not as central as my brain is to the whole operation."

"I don't think you could make me feel bad about myself now by saying something about my body, but that's the difference between 16 and 24," she continued.

Lorde released Solar Power on Aug. 20. — and recently opened up about the effects social media had on her mental health.

"I did it because I felt like my brain wasn't working very well anymore," Lorde said to James Corden on The Late Late Show. "It was horribly difficult, the hardest thing I've ever done. It's still horribly difficult every day. It would be like stopping eating sugar for me like I still eat tons of sugar. And if I don't have sugar, I feel insane."

She was also set to perform a track from Solar Power at the 2021 MTV Video Music Awards before dropping out due to "a change in production elements."

"Due to a change in production elements, Lorde can no longer perform at this year's show. We love Lorde and cannot wait for her to perform on the VMA stage in the future!" the VMAs tweeted.