Twenty-year-old pop star Lorde wants kids, "deeply" she says, but not just yet.

"Big time," she said when asked during a round of quick-fire questions from Newshub reporter Ryan Bridge.

She has no idea how many, but "I come from a big family," she says.

Lorde, who offstage is Ella Yellich O'Connor, grew up in Auckland's Devonport with two sisters and a brother.

Are kids part of her near-future plans? "I don't think so. I have a bit more work to do," she says.

And if you were wondering what she would be doing if it wasn't music, she'd be making perfume.

"Creating scents - I'm obsessed with perfume. I haven't done it but I'm a perfume nut."

She talked about the making of her new record Melodrama, and all the things she has learnt in the creative process.

Back in town for her sister's graduation, she says it had an impact on her seeing all the young people who'd been studying.

"I was very aware of being a high school dropout.

"Sometimes I want to pick traditional learning back up because with a profession like mine you are learning all the time but it's much more lateral, more abstract, I feel like at some point I'm really going to crave sitting down and taking a test.

She says there are a lot of experiences that make up her new album, like moving out of home, and the ending of a relationship.



"Going through a break-up - every time that happens you learn and you grow and all that stuff contributes," she says.

"The record to me is about everything that happened after, so it's not a break-up record, it's about the magic of being alone... I was living alone for the first time and really having the space to process."

She says Melodrama is something she couldn't help making. Rather than simply making music you think you'd want to hear, "we're kind of indebted to our hearts and our brains".

At the end of the interview, Bridge passed on a gift from metal godfather Alice Cooper, who he'd interviewed a week earlier.

Cooper said Lorde needs to listen to folk songwriter Laura Nyro's 1968 album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which she also wrote at the age of 20.