Lorde has paused work on her third album following the death of her beloved dog Pearl.
“I've been working away on the new songs for most of this year in New Zealand. It's been going pretty well, but something happened last month that I need to tell you about,” the 22-year-old singer told fans in her newsletter.
Lorde said Pearl, who had a lifetime of illness, “dropped some weight over a few weeks in October” but received medicine that seemed to be working.
“But one day we woke up and I knew, in that way mothers do, that he was sicker than we had realized, and that we were nearing a point where his body wasn't going to be able to cope,” she recalled. “I rushed him to the specialists. Pearl had two cardiac arrests about an hour apart, and after the second one, he died. I was holding him when he went, and I know he knew that I was there.
“But this loss has been indescribably painful, and a light that was turned on for me has gone out.”
Lorde said Pearl, whom she adopted last year, “brought an immeasurable amount of joy and purpose” to her life.
“We spent almost all our time alone together, him asleep under the piano as I played, or on the porch together, or in the park, where he became a blurry speck of gold in the green, far away,” she wrote.
Lorde credited Pearl with shepherding her creativity as she wrote songs for her follow-up to 2017’s Melodrama.
“It's going to take some time and recalibration, now that there's no shepherd ahead of me, to see what the work is going to be,” she shared. “So I'm asking for your patience, as 2020 comes around and you start to wonder where the next record is.
“I have lost my boy, and I need some time to see the good again, to finish making this for you.”