The similarity between Lorde‘s new single and GQ’s annual Man of the Year party is no coincidence. According to the pop star, she started writing the track just one day after attending the event in 2023.
During an appearance on Australian radio program Triple J Thursday (May 29), Lorde opened up about how the publication’s party two years ago triggered a gender revelation for her that would end up inspiring “Man of the Year,” which dropped the same day as the interview. “I had been feeling this expansiveness of gender happening for a while, and this was my first event that I’d been to in a while,” she began.
“I wore kind of like a ‘hot girl’ dress,” continued the “Royals” singer, who attended the event in a form-fitting green gown and heels. “And I felt so not like myself. And it was a really cool marker, especially being at this event that was celebrating all these cool guys, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m one of those guys, like, sometimes, when I wanna be. And I was like, ‘Whoa, I don’t think the hot-girl dress is the right device for this moment.’”
The next day, Lorde says she and producer Jim-E Stack “were in the studio kind of hung over, and I was like, ‘I wanna write a song about how I’m the Man of the Year for me.’”
Lorde has been open about how new album Virgin — which drops June 27 — was inspired by her broadening gender identity over the past few years. In a cover story interview with Rolling Stone published earlier in May, she discussed how recovering from an eating disorder and stopping birth control allowed her to feel more at home in her own body and masculinity, adding, “I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.”
The sentiment echoes something she posted on her Instagram Story in 2023 immediately after the GQ party. Sharing a photo of herself in her dress, she’d written, “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.”
When asked how it’s felt to share her newfound gender identity with fans, Lorde shared on Triple J that it’s “a little bit scary.”
“I feel what the lack of definitive boxes for this sort of stuff does to people, and I totally understand,” she added. “Sometimes we really need these containers, but for me personally, I felt like where I’m at, it’s all just still flowing, it’s still moving. And I think it’s probably like that for someone else, too, and maybe it’s OK to celebrate that impermanence, that rawness, that lack of arrival.”
Watch Lorde’s full interview on Triple J above.
