Last month, I released a 5-song companion piece to my album Solar Power, sung in te reo Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand. I was given a golden megaphone, and it’s here to stay. Eight years later, I’ve got enough social media followers to populate a small country. Enough people decided: what you’re saying is interesting, and we want to keep hearing you say it. Hundreds of thousands of kids around the world, my megaphone worked on them. Artists I’d looked up to for years, they could hear me. All of a sudden journalists at major publications could hear my voice, still coming from my bedroom at the bottom of the world. This megaphone amplified my voice tenfold, so that it wasn’t just heard by the people I knew. Maybe you’re familiar with my story - I was one of a million kids posting stuff online from their childhood bedroom, trying to impress their friends, when one day something crazy happened - I was handed a golden megaphone. You didn’t go looking for it, rather, it was something that happened to you. I’m sure many of you in this room came by your power in a way that felt serendipitous - right place, right time a cocktail of privilege, skill and luck. Read Lorde’s speech in its entirety below: “It felt like all the answers were out there, like I could be healed by the natural world.” As she says in her Power of Women cover story: “The purity of being outside was really magical to me,” Lorde says. In fact, the project is a sonic love letter to the natural world. Lorde is not one to talk the talk without walking it, and she did just that when, for her latest album, “Solar Power,” she resisted a CD release, demonstrating her commitment to slowing the speed of climate change.