NOW Toronto/2015/Interview

===Interviewhttps://web.archive.org/web/20151116162101/https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/grimes/https://nowtoronto.com/music/five-emerging-artists-grimes-loves/===
GRIMES: DON’T CALL CLAIRE BOUCHER A POP STAR. SHE’S WAY OVER IT.
Done with trying to please people, Claire Boucher took her time with Art Angels, and the result is her weirdest and most accessible album yet
“No, no, no,” says the musician better known as Grimes over the phone from Los Angeles, exasperation in her voice. “Every single headline that comes out is ‘Grimes Is A Pop Star.’ I’m just like, ‘Fuck you.’ 
“I have no problem with pop music, but I’m just emphatically not [a pop star]. I’m an independent musician. That’s really important to me. I sit at home and make beats.”
She has, however, toured with Skrillex and, this past summer, Lana Del Rey. Jay Z’s Roc Nation now manages her career. And her just-released Art Angels was so closely guarded by her label, 4AD, that I was only allowed to hear five of the 14 tracks before its release November 6. 
Then there’s her music, which blurs the line between modern-day pop and traditional indie. It’s from this grey area that experimental artists like FKA twigs and Purity Ring are currently finding a place on the Billboard charts, as Grimes will also surely do if Art Angels’ early glowing reviews are any indication. First single Flesh Without Blood is addictively catchy à la Taylor or Katy, and another single-worthy romp, California, has upbeat country twang (she’s learned how to play guitar since Visions) and a definitive, sugary chorus backed by cheery handclaps. 
Formerly Boucher’s musical trademark, her synth soundscapes are now more subdued, layered beneath guitar loops and glossy vocals. The album runs the genre gamut, as if Boucher had a must-have checklist. She excitedly runs through the track list: Crazy banger? Venus Fly, featuring Janelle Monáe. (“I just wanted to make my own banger to prove that I could,” she says.) Deranged pop? Kill V. Maim. Rap-worthy beat? Scream (featuring Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes). 
Her defensiveness about the pop tag is understandable. For the last three years, the Vancouver-raised Boucher’s every move has been reported in the media and super-analyzed by fans. Even her Tumblr post complaining that music journalists turn each of her posts into a news story garnered a footnote added to a Pitchfork article.
It’s just that when it comes to Grimes, there’s been a lot to talk about. Her unexpected stardom following her 2012 breakthrough album, Visions, catapulted her out of Montreal’s DIY loft scene and into Roc Nation’s office. There’s the falling out she had with Arbutus, the indie label that released her first two records. She’s become a fashion darling of Christian Dior and wore Louis Vuitton to the Met Ball. 
Media, fans and critics have been hard at work trying to figure out the 27-year-old musician/producer with the childlike voice and candy-coated hooks, who swings between arty and mainstream extremes. Some music journalists have triumphantly dubbed her the new face of pop, and more than a few fans have called her a sellout. 
While the internet spent the last three years pontificating about her, Boucher was trying to figure herself out, too – all while writing, recording and producing one of the most anticipated albums of the year. She scrapped one version of it in the process – because it “sucked” and was “depressing,” she said at the time – and was adamant about releasing Art Angels on her own terms. 
“At any given point until this album was done, I would’ve rather suffered the consequences of waiting than put out [something I wasn’t happy with],” Boucher says. “The pressure I felt to make an album that was better than Visions outweighed the pressure to appease people in a short-term way.” 
Last year she learned the hard way that pleasing people is often impossible, even when you try. After releasing Go, a drop-heavy single co-produced by close friend Blood Diamonds and originally written for Rihanna, criticism from some fans was swift. 
“Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins [are allowed to] have upfront vocals and hooks, but they’re alternative,” Boucher says. “But if I have upfront vocals and hooks, I’m pop or I’ve sold out.”
The stigma of going mainstream has trailed Boucher since her early days. Flesh Without Blood was inspired, in fact, by her falling out with some long-time friends and artistic peers in Montreal after her newfound success and departure from super-indie Arbutus to 4AD.
“There was a real difference of opinion between us on that,” Boucher says. “I’m not going to do a Budweiser commercial, but I don’t really feel like being impoverished.” 
Plus, there are upsides to having an ever-widening spotlight: in addition to bigger tours and bigger budgets, her opinions on matters close to her heart – like lifting the veil on misogyny in the music industry – also get noticed. 
Take her 2013 Tumblr post entitled I Don’t Want To Have To Compromise My Morals In Order To Make A Living, in which she wrote, “I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if I did this by accident and I’m gonna flounder without them. Or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology.” 
That post has been liked and re-blogged over 21,000 times. 
Boucher’s also using her star power to maintain a tight grip on her career. In August, she launched Eerie Organization, a small artist-cooperative-cum-indie-label that released Art Angels in Canada and will put out other music hand-picked by Boucher. 
“There are some artists I really, really love who weren’t getting signed or getting good deal offers,” she explains in her chatty, friendly way. “It just made me really upset that they’d be self-releasing on Bandcamp and nobody would see it.” 
Eerie’s first signee is Stouffville, Ontario-raised singer/songwriter Nicole Dollanganger, who Boucher has also brought on her current tour.
“I’m playing some shows with her and I’m actually scared,” Boucher gushes. “She’s opening for me, but she’s definitely just much better than me live.”
Boucher comes alive when talking about artists she loves, fangirling over Lana Del Rey in particular. (She’d been advised against doing that tour since she was supposed to be finishing her album, but she’s such a fan that she said, “Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway.”) She also peppers her speech with “I don’t knows,” ends long statements with throwaways like “This makes no sense” and often lets her sentences slip away mid-thought. 
These glimpses of uncertainty or lack of clarity seem less like evidence of self-doubt than like a way to prevent her from saying something that might become a sensational headline the next day. 
“I kind of see myself as a way less popular Billy Corgan,” she says, not even joking. “I listen to Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and it’s kind of all over the place....” She trails off. “I feel like [Corgan and I] share similarities in that we’re both really bad at talking to journalists and maybe a bit too emotional for our own good.” 
These days Boucher lives in Los Angeles and can’t hide her reservations about it. She sighs heavily before saying that the food is good (“but people don’t use enough salt here”) and so is the weather, even though she misses winter. Now that she’s done the record, she and a group of close friends are planning to move some place where “I can forget I’m a musician and go to a restaurant and chill,” like Nashville, Portland or maybe even Toronto. 
So all in all, what’s her take-away from the past few years?
“I think I’ve learned that performing isn’t super-scary – it’s pretty scary – but I think I can be good at if it put my mind to it. And I’m more of a dick than I thought.” 
Oh?
“I can either protect myself and make people hate me,” Boucher explains, “or I can be a total pushover and just have a really bad time all the time. I used to be a pushover and had a terrible time.
“I yelled at some people for the first time….” she begins to say before a voice in the background cuts her off. A handler trying to prevent her from saying too much? 
“Ah, okay, whatever,” she says to the unknown voice. 
She returns to the line. 
“I’m not willing to put up with bullshit any more.”
Five emerging artists Grimes loves
BY SAMANTHA EDWARDS
NOVEMBER 11, 2015
Aristophanes
Boucher’s boyfriend, James Brooks (Default Genders), got her hooked on Aristophanes, the MC who appears on Art Angels track Scream. Based in Taiwan, Aristophanes raps in Mandarin over glitchy, harsh beats with a ferocious swagger wholly her own. As Boucher says, it’s “insane.” 
She-Devils
She-Devils are the Montreal-based electronic duo of Audrey Boucher (no relation to Grimes) and Kyle Bennett. A new addition to the underground loft scene that birthed Grimes, the band opened for Majical Cloudz at their release shows this past fall and are currently working on their debut EP.
Nicole Dollanganger
Dollanganger’s bedroom, where she recorded some of her first music ever, is overflowing with stare-into-your-soul antique dolls. Somehow, it feels symbolic of her music: an unsettling mix of ethereal, heavy-eyed vocals over dark guitar tones. Her new LP, Natural Born Losers, is the first release on Grimes’s new label. 
Tei Shi
Earlier this year, the Argentina-born, Vancouver-raised, Brooklyn-based Tei Shi’s Verde EP was NOW’s album of the week. On it, she gracefully mixes alt-R&B and shoegaze atmospherics. She just wrapped up a tour with the cerebral electro trio Years & Years. 
N-Qia
Hailing from Tokyo, N-Qia are an alt-electronic pair equally skilled at making epic experimental soundscapes and subtle, warm melodies. It’s this diversity that appealed to Boucher, who calls them “crazy, trippy and gorgeous.”
Category:Interview
Category:2015