Lorde has penned an emotional tribute to her father - and his role in her path to music stardom.
Writing in The Listener to mark Father's Day, Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O'Connor, recalled being a "quiet kid" who like to read and slink upstairs when birthday parties were "humming downstairs".
She remembers sitting by herself in the "big cavity" the slides used to feed into at Auckland's Western Springs park. "Kids push and run around me. I look up, and Dad is waving, holding an ice cream from the zoo canteen. It's boysenberry. I still remember the taste of it, that exact cone."
Lorde also writes that without her father, Vic O'Connor, she doesn't make music.
"I don't know what a good song sounds like. I don't know how it feels to be taken someplace in the words. I shut my eyes and hear his voice in the dark, singing the old songs over and over, ending each one with ohhh-yeah, because he's a first-verse-and-chorus kind of guy."
