“Our next guest made her U.S. TV debut on our Late Night show last year and since then has become one of the most popular artists in music,” host Jimmy Fallon said while introducing Lorde on Tuesday night’s Tonight Show. The teenage New Zealand singer’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric: She went from performing “Royals” in the 12:35 a.m. hour in October 2013 to promoting the soundtrack she curated for the Number One film in America in November 2014.
Lorde’s ascension came full circle Tuesday as she visited Fallon to perform “Yellow Flicker Beat,” her single from the Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 soundtrack she helped arrange. While the Tonight Show rendition didn’t carry the same magnitude as her amazing American Music Awards version two days earlier, the performance still served as a victory lap for the Pure Heroine singer.
In addition to the performance, Lorde also sat down with Fallon to talk about how she came up with her royal moniker, how the Hunger Games soundtrack came together and meeting Taylor Swift for the first time. “I wanted something kind of aristocratic and fancy, so I found the name L-O-R-D, but I wanted to feminize it and make up a word,” the singer born Ella Yelich-O’Connor says of her stage name, adding that her friends and family don’t call her Lorde.
Lorde also shared an amusing anecdote about meeting her good friend Taylor Swift at the burger joint Shake Shack in New York and how Swift once pretended Lorde was her manager at a Grammy party:
