Brave, exciting, outspoken, authentic – Grimes is the magic musical formula we need right now
On an LA freeway, in the backseat of a huge SUV whose overblown Hollywood decadence feels vastly at odds with its current guest, Grimes opens our conversation exactly as I would hope. ‘I like to think nothing is impossible.’
She’s not the first person to say it, but she is one of the few inhabitants of today’s music landscape, where autonomy, authenticity and success are a rare combination, who is actually proving it to be true, on her own terms, in her own way.
There is nothing in her career that Grimes, aka 28-year-old Vancouver-born Claire Boucher, hasn’t personally approved. Jay-Z may be the boss of her management company Roc Nation, but she calls the shots. Take the now infamous story of a member of her team suggesting she airbrush her underarm hair from a press shot. The shot was sent to Jay-Z, who replied she should keep it. Because if you buy into Grimes, you buy into her whole package. From the way she sounds, to the way she looks, to who she talks to, where she plays and what she releases, Grimes is CEO, creative director, music supervisor, writer, producer, performer and brand ambassador of her own career.
‘I feel pretty proud of it,’ she says, navigating a huge vegan burrito as we creep slowly through the endless traffic towards her LA apartment. ‘The scene I came from in Montreal, everyone produced their own music, so it’s not like I was breaking a boundary, I was just doing what I saw other people doing. But I guess the bigger the project, the harder it is to maintain independence and control. You’re asking people to invest money into what you’re doing and you’re asking them to trust you, so I’m realising now it’s more of an achievement.’
By doing things her own way, creating her own future, she’s guaranteed herself a career for life. By understanding every piece of the process in crafting Grimes, she’s the one with all the power. ‘I don’t worry about my future,’ she says. ‘I know if I got dropped by my label, I’d still be able to make records, because I own all the equipment and I have all the skills. You physically can’t take it away from me. If I didn’t write or produce my own music, my career would be completely in the hands of other people and that’s a really terrifying situation. I feel safe knowing it’s my thing. It’s the source of my personal confidence and its power.
‘So many times I’ve been told, “You really should work with someone else” or “The album cover should be a photograph”, but my whole sense of identity comes from doing that stuff. It’s always better to be able to know you’re putting out the best thing you can possibly make. If it’s something you really hate, you’ll have to perform it for the rest of your life.’
If this makes Grimes sound like she’s always the one in the room with the loudest voice, with the strongest opinion, that being the boss comes naturally, it’s not quite true. She speaks quickly and decisively, with passion and conviction, but self-doubt still creeps in, whether it’s saying how she ‘hates’ her singing voice, that she can’t watch herself live or that at the end of every gig, her first thought is, ‘Thank god it’s over.’ What she’s learnt, she says, is how to deal with it.
‘Faux confidence – the most important thing in any job,’ she grins. ‘Just pretend that you’re cool – it really works. My whole job is convincing myself, for short periods of time, that I have more confidence than I do. I’m pretty shy and I hate parties. I mostly just prefer being at home and watching TV, but I think it’s good not to be afraid to say what you want. I think you can be introverted and antisocial, but still be sure of yourself. The more I get into speaking assertively, the more I get done. And also exercise helps. I’ve had a lot less anxiety since I started doing burpees.’
Grimes got into making music while at university in Montreal. She was midway through a neuro-science degree when a friend taught her how to use GarageBand. ‘I was addicted to it,’ she says, ‘addicted to the feeling of when you finish a song, so I just kept doing it, then I did a show where I got paid $275, which was my rent at the time, so I was like, “I can get paid from music!”’
From that point on, music became her focus, the most all-consuming thing in her life. She saw the word ‘Grime’ on Myspace, liked the sound of it and made it her moniker.
She played shows, made money, left university, signed a deal, signed a second deal, and by the time her third album Visions was released, music press and fans alike were infatuated. ‘I think for anyone who’s successful in art, it’s 90% luck and chance,’ she says, modestly. ‘I was actually discovered at a very opportune time and a lot of things fell into place.
‘I know a lot of very talented people, who work very hard, who don’t have careers in the arts. I guess, in a roundabout way, what I’m really saying is, if you’re fucking talented and you’re not getting anywhere, you shouldn’t feel bad, because it’s not just hard work and talent.’
Grimes is now on her fourth album, Art Angels, a multi-genre mash-up that contains a little piece of all her complexities. It’s different from 2012’s Visions, and indeed 2010’s Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, but it’s still a treasure trove of brilliance. The sort of record you can’t sit still to, you can’t passively listen to. Each listen gives you a new song to play on repeat and a new emotion to feel. Putting it out, she says, came with a huge dose of anxiety, convinced that the world was going to hate it.
‘There’s an aspect of that in everything I do,’ she explains. ‘When I put out Visions, everyone was mad, like “This is such a sell-out record!” There was a lot of aggression online and it was distinctly from men, too. Now I see that a portion of the fan base has this weird control. Art Angels was a really confident, professionally produced record and people were like, “Go back to your experimental beats!” But you’re not really a fan if you don’t want me to be successful. Asking me to not be ambitious technically is kind of cruel. I just came to the conclusion that if I was going to alienate those people, and that was my only fan base, I was comfortable with that.’
She understands the power of music to tap into emotions. ‘A little goth’ teenager, who listened to My Chemical Romance and Smashing Pumpkins, she met her best friend at school through a shared love of Green Day. Now it’s Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey and FKA twigs who are her favourites. ‘I loved that with Beyoncé’s Lemonade people could have an intellectual dialogue about it, and yet it’s really satisfying pop music, too,’ she says. ‘That’s a difficult achievement and as a fan, it’s enjoyable to get something that’s so complicated and thought provoking but so pleasurable at the same time. I think Lemonade is a masterpiece.’
As well as writing, producing, singing, touring and designing artwork, Grimes has her own collective, Eerie Organization, helping other artists get recognition. So far, she has one signing, fellow Canadian, Nicole Dollanganger. ‘I’m constantly intimidated by how good her music is,’ she says. ‘Part of the reason I wanted to sign her to Eerie Organization was to light a fire under my ass to make better music, but I also wanted to create a place where young artists wouldn’t have to sign their lives away. The deal with Nicole was, if someone better comes along, sign with them.
‘For most artists, if you want to do something, you have to sign away a lot of freedom and usually the next decade of your life. I signed some dumb stuff when I was younger, which really screwed me over, and I know a lot of artists whose careers have been ruined by a bad deal, so I wanted to make a label with no deals. With Eerie it was, if something better comes along, please, leave us.’
The music world’s fiendish obsession with Grimes is obvious, but it’s no wonder that fashion has also been captivated, too. It’s not necessarily in the way she puts together an outfit [today it’s a Comic Con hoodie, camo leggings under denim cut-offs and bright red Fenty x Puma by Rihanna trainers, with huge purple Paris Hilton-esque shades], it’s more her punk spirit that designers want a piece of.
‘Most of my favourite artists use fashion to their advantage, whether that’s FKA twigs or Prince,’ she says. ‘You can say a lot with clothes. I’m never trying to be political, but the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever had cleavage in my life could be taken as a political statement. What you do or don’t wear signals things about your ethics, so I like taking advantage of fashion as a means of communication. In music videos, a sick look, even with make-up, is the cheapest thing you can do to make a real impact.’
She’s been dressed by Louis Vuitton for the past two years’ Met Balls, Chanel before that and there’s a big bag of Balmain swag in the back of the SUV that she’s been gifted. Then, when Stella McCartney picked four girls for her latest fragrance campaign, Grimes stood alongside Amandla Stenberg, model Kenya Kinski-Jones and Lourdes Leon.
Stella, unsurprisingly, is a huge hero. ‘It’s really, really important to me that she’s so adamant about ethics,’ Grimes says. ‘I meet a lot of people who are jaded and have been in the industry a long time and who don’t really care, but Stella really cares. And working with Amandla was a selling point. I was like, I really respect this person, and I think she’s going to accomplish a lot in her life, so I’d be proud to be involved in something with her.’
There’s a lot of power in being Grimes and that’s not something she takes lightly. You feel the bigger she gets, the less she’s going to compromise. ‘It’s a good time to be a young woman,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of opportunities that 10 years ago I wouldn’t have had, but there’s also a lot we need to work on. It’s silly to be complacent.’ Complacent? That’s the last thing Grimes is ever going to be.
Text by Francesca Babb for ASOS Magazine.
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