Grammy award-winner Lorde releases her new album Pure Heroine. Provided to China Daily

French DJ duo Daft Punk, teenage Lorde take top Grammys

Overnight fame

Born to a poet mother and an engineer father, she started singing and acting at the age of 5. She was in a school talent show at 12 and later was offered a contract by Universal Music.

Though she says that she has been singing her whole life, she didn't really know the art because she was not a songwriter at that point and she was not sure whether she wanted a career in music.

Then she signed a development contract and she met her writing partner and producer Joel Little. When she writes songs, she doesn't bring any instruments. She just uses her voice and makes quick sample beats with her computer.

"From that point, we just sort of head off really quick with the writing. I know what I want to make and what I want to do," she says.

Her main inspiration has come from short stories. The first short-story writer she read was Raymond Carver, who has "a really minimal way with words" and inspires her.

When it comes to lyrics, Lorde says that she has to be accurate-they must describe something that actually happen to her-because it's meaningful to her.

Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "Lorde's languidly aphoristic lyrics balance rock-star swagger and torqued-up teenage angst" and that her lyrics "have a rattle-nerve pathos and power like nothing else going in 2013". Critics called Pure Heroine "an album of a generation".

For the young singer-songwriter, who grew up listening to soul musicians Etta James and Otis Redding, and drew musical inspiration from electropop artists, such as James Blake, she describes the album as "all the things going along with being 16 or 17, living in the suburbs and feeling those things that you felt".

As she launches her North American tour in 2014, Lorde says that she likes being onstage though it's a little bit stressful, since everything is done in a rush.

"I like being in a kind of calm environment," she says.