Lorde Stuns Fans with Rare Beach Photo: Radiant Beauty

Lorde is a very successful singer. She began her career over a decade ago as a teenager, when her hit single "Royals" was released. Lorde would follow it up with songs like "Team", "Green Light", and "Solar Power." Lorde is a notoriously private person, but made her return to Instagram this week. In the post, she is seen enjoying a beach day.

Lorde genuinely loves making music. She talked about this in an interview with Time. "A lot of people make pop music because it will make them rich," she says. "I make this music because I'm obsessed with it and I think it's the best thing in the world. Part of me feels like everything I do from now on, if it's not as big as 'Royals,' some people will perceive it as a failure. But for me, I'm going to spend my life worshipping the form. Sometimes that will just mean that it comes on at a party and everyone runs to the dance floor."

To Lorde, speaking out is extremely important. She tells Time, "Now it's time to lose our sh-t, whatever that looks like. Protesting or being on a dance floor crying and screaming. It's all the right color." Lorde also said in the interview that she wants to educate herself on certain issues. "There's a lot I don't know," she says. "I want to spend time understanding and learning and filling my head with marginalized voices as opposed to just retweeting a bunch of stuff."

For Lorde, privacy is extremely important. "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," she said to Vogue. "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."

Lorde talked about finding confidence in herself in her Vogue interview. "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. When I talk about being playful in the making of this album, there was, for want of a better word, a sexual component to that. Engaging the natural world in a big way is like a flirtation. That's how it felt to me. Playful and joyful and a little bit nasty."

Lorde opened up about her songwriting process in her Vogue interview. "I'm very comfortable in a place of vulnerability or contemplation of the future or my own mortality. Those are not necessarily scary or sad spaces for me to occupy, and the fact that they're on there means that I kind of moved through it and have felt the joy coming out the other side. I only come back because I've had one of these epiphanic periods. I've shifted shape, and I want to do that justice. And then I know when it's time to go back and spend another year reading on my couch."