Under the Radar/2013/Interview

Interview
Photoshoot
===Interviewhttps://imgur.com/a/HzBenbo===
Grimes 
Claire Boucher
Top 6 Albums of 2012
1. Julia Holter: Ekstasis 
2. Lana Del Rey: Born to Die 
3. Taylor Swift: Red
4. Swans: The Seer
5. Doldrums: Lesser Evil-The new Doldrums record (it's not out, but it's insane).
6. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange 
7. I don't really remember what records came out this year.
What was the highlight of 2012 for either you personally or for the band?
Going on tour with Skrillex!
What was the low point of 2012 for you?
Losing my Swiss army knife.
What are your hopes and plans for 2013?
Live somewhere.
To what extent did the poor world economy affect your ability to make a reasonable living as an artist in 2012?
Didn't really affect me. I mean, I tour a lot, but I'm also very accustomed to an extremely low standard of living (I haven't been over the poverty line since I lived with my parents), so compared to most years of my life this one was pretty good actually.
What are your thoughts on the 2012 U.S. presidential election?
I'm really fucking glad that Romney isn't the president, but I wasn't too worried about him winning.
What pop culture phenomenon from 2012 would you most like to erase from your memory?
I like all pop culture phenomena, even horrible ones.
Where you affected by Hurricane Sandy? Do you think climate change was partly responsible for the hurricane?
I was in Hurricane Sandy, it was insane. I guess I was mostly just worried for people, but it was kind of fun on some levels and kind of beautiful to see everyone helping each other out.
Tell us about the most memorable fan encounter you had this year. 
Some guy in Phoenix who came way too close to my face and told me he likes to stare at my skin and then he licked his lips. It was horrifying.
What were some of the rejected names for your band?
Fruity (a band Marilyn Manson and Billy Corgan wanted to start). I'm still making a band called Fruity though.
Tell us about your first kiss. 
It was with a guy who is a pretty famous snowboarder these days actually LOL.
Would you survive a zombie apocalypse?
Ya. I was trained from a young age how to hunt and deal with all kinds of survivalist stuff so I would be fine. Zombies also don't move very fast so it's probably one of the least dangerous types of apocalypses.
In your opinion, what artist represents the cutting edge in music today? Who is doing something that no one else is doing? 
Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Lana Del Rey, Elite Gymnastics.
You could slide one of your songs into the soundtrack of any movie. What would it be? Which scene? 
It would be the [Alejandro] Jodorowsky Dune movie that never got made.
What do you think about the use of drone attacks in the war on terror?
I feel very scared about what the increased use of drones could lead to, and I have very negative feelings about the war on terror.
In 2012, what was the best movie you saw, book you read, comic book you read, video game you played, and/or TV show you watched? The Borgias and Game of Thrones were amazing. The best book I read were the [Marilyn] Manson and Jenna Jameson bios by Neil Strauss. The best video game I played was probably Limbo. The best movies I saw were Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, Enter the Void, and Antichrist. Best comic was Wilson by Dan Clowes.
Do you have any other thoughts about the current state of the world or the state of the music industry?
People need to get over the irrational quest for 'authenticity' that seems to only include indie musicians in flannel. It's totally legit to be just a writer or just a performer. I don't see Beethoven or Bach performing their work and no one gets their panties in a twist over that. I think the world is in a state of disaster. Priority should also be educating women in third world countries so there is less unwanted pregnancy. Population control should be a huge priority.
GRIMES
Post-Internet Superstar
Words by Matt Fink
Claire Boucher cringes as soon as I say the words "post-Internet," as if she knew they were coming. Those two words-having originated in an interview when she was reaching for an apt description of the technology-aided, stylistically omnivorous music she makes as Grimes-have turned up in nearly everything written about her since, and it's obvious that she is tired of explaining them. And she has had a lot of explaining to do since her third full-length album, Visions, was released in January 2012. Welcomed as a highly experimental, entirely disorienting brand of hybridized electronic music, her work simultaneously exemplifies and subverts the notion of what it means to make pop music in the 21st century, eroding further the boundaries between genres and among audiences.
That's the reason those words "post-Internet" have stuck: the words "pop music" don't mean much of anything anymore. But for many people they still carry cultural meaning, a shorthand for "popular" music. It's this definition that Boucher uses, and it's clear that whatever music she places into that category, she is utterly obsessed with it. That in itself is not exceptional, as the underground and mainstream worlds overlap more now than ever before. But the degree to which Boucher embraces music that in an earlier era would have been considered more or less disposable ear candy is remarkable.
"My all-time favorite artists are pop artists," she says matter-of-factly from her father's house in Vancouver. Dressed casually in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, her constantly changing hair color dyed jet black, she looks like any other 24-year-old without the alternately silly and austere costumes she wears in her videos and photo shoots. "My biggest role models and inspirations are Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. I mean, I'm not like them. I'll never be that technically good or that good of a performer or anything, but as far as the stuff that I'm interested in and the music I listen to, it's pretty much 80 percent pop music and 20 percent weird stuff."
Appropriately, Visions is about 80 percent pop music and 20 percent weird stuff, but the weird stuff is arguably what makes it interesting. That said, Visions is not a pop album in a commercial sense-it's too darkly ethereal in its textures, too unconventional with its melodies to be Top 40 material-but Boucher is clearly aiming to make something we haven't heard before. She just didn't know there would be anyone who would want to hear it.
"I thought it was too weird for people to like it in a pop sense but too pop for anyone who is like a music person to like it," she admits. "So I thought people would like it, but I thought there might be a backlash because it was too much of a middle ground. There's all this pop music that I love that doesn't try to mean anything, and there's all this weird music that I love that would be better if it had a pop structure and a great singer on there. I made music just to fulfill my needs musically; that's what I wanted to do. I thought that maybe I'd get to do an international tour." She looks away shyly and then concludes, "It went pretty well, I guess."
Boucher can seem much older when she's discussing her craft and very childlike when describing herself, at once confident and articulate, then shy and self-conscious. When she seems on the verge of saying something particularly profound, she will stop herself, trailing off with a laugh. Though she is very much aware of the history of popular music, she is a representative of a new generation of musicians for whom the punk rock culture wars, the independent versus major label debates, even the distinctions between mainstream and underground, have ceased to mean much of anything. In short, she is a child of the post-Internet era, a person who, with no sense of irony, uses her Twitter to proclaim her love of Swans and Justin Bieber, of Taylor Swift and harsh noise pioneers Whitehouse. All of this she treats as absolutely ordinary, the natural out- come of having come of age in an era where music is no longer an instant cultural signifier, where liking a particular kind of music doesn't necessarily make you a particular kind of person.
"I guess I never really processed distinctions between music that much," she explains. "It always seemed like everything was fair game. Maybe that's just a generational thing, but the fact that people think that's weird I find very odd. It always seemed normal to me. Probably a lot of that has to do with access. You're on the Internet, and it's just the Wild West. Before, you would just go to your section of the music store. I noticed it a lot more when I was younger, because my parents were like, 'We only listen to this,' and my grandparents were like, 'We only listen to this.' It seemed like from the moment that I had Napster, everything seemed"- Boucher trails off-"I mean, the same radio station would play OutKast and Marilyn Manson for sure. The Top 40 in the 2000s was crazy."
Anyone over 30 knows that things weren't always this way, especially in the indie rock world. In the 1980s, it would have been fairly unthinkable that the same people buying Sonic Youth albums at the record store would also be picking up a Tiffany or Debbie Gibson LP at the mall. In the '90s, if you were going to Pavement and Guided By Voices shows, you almost certainly weren't listening to Mariah Carey on the drive home. But something started changing around the time that Napster forever transformed the way that people listened to music in the early 2000s, and when nearly every album ever made became instantly available (for free!) those genre distinctions started to dissolve into iTunes playlists where Beyoncé brushed up against Beethoven and Broken Social Scene. And when genuinely innovative producers such as Pharrell and Timbaland started working with pop stars like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, even the most manufactured pop star had to be taken seriously on some level. But even if Boucher has no trouble admitting that she shares many of her musical crushes with people who only listen to Top 40 radio, she seems conflicted, almost apologetically so, about the extent to which pop music plays a role in her work.
"It's really dumb, but I just love writing pop songs, like, alone," she says, pushing out the words as if they are a confession. "I have so much music on my computer that I could never ever release. It would be humiliating and ruin my reputation. I've got a particular career path that is associated with my life story, and it's important for me to do experimental things and push the envelope in some regard. But sometimes there's a sacrifice in terms of accessibility when you're doing that. That's fine, because that's what Grimes is and that's what I want to do with this project. This project is about trying to reformulate pop music into something that could be..." Again, frustratingly, she changes the subject. "Sometimes it's just really fun to write a satisfying song that's really basic and that has lyrics that might be totally stupid. The funnest word to sing is 'baby.' But I can't just have that all over my record. I get two or three 'babys' on my record, max. The rhetoric of pop music is just really ingrained in everything, because you've grown up listening to it. Those words and phrases seem really natural, and you want to sing them and you want to hear them. But I can't put out a record myself that's like that, because it's incredibly vapid."
I Never See/I Never Understand
Claire Boucher needs space to make her music, and that's partly why she has returned to her father's house. She won't be here long-she's relocating in a few days to nearby Squamish, a former pulp mill town nestled in the mountains of British Columbia-but after having spent most of the year sharing a van with eight other people, she's happy to have a space of her own for a few days. She should be on tour right now, but she had to cancel a month's worth of shows to rest her ears, as her adolescent years of walking with a Walkman glued to her head on full blast have left her with tinnitus and irreparable hearing loss. She isn't going to waste this time alone. For the first time since she finished Visions, she is writing music again.
"It's kind of like... industrial country," she says of her new music, laughing deviously. "Not new country but like Patsy Cline country. I'm really into Sarah McLachlan. And I'm really into writing real songs that have really good vocal hooks that aren't mainstream. I don't want Carly Rae [Jepsen] vocal hooks; I want Sarah McLachlan vocal hooks, like, really emotionally affecting. And not totally overdubbed. In the past, I've had so many over- dubs because it's nerve-wracking to sing, and I'm not a trained singer or anything. But I want to have the vocal hooks up front. I'm also super into computers, and I've been listening back to a lot of Nine Inch Nails."
Before Boucher knew that she could make music with computers, she started out like any other kid, flailing away at violin lessons at the age of five. Unfortunately, her teacher soon pronounced her "pointedly untalented," and Boucher spent the rest of her adolescence not knowing that music would ever play a role in her life beyond damaging her hearing. While still a child, her parents divorced and Boucher moved in with her father and her four brothers-two older, two younger-and was essentially raised as a boy, learning to hunt and drive a pickup truck at an age when most children were playing with dolls and Matchbox cars. She grew to become an intense teenager, she says, battered at home by her brothers and bullied at school for her lisp and nervous tic. Music became a place to hide, the waves of intense noise blaring through her headphones becoming an outlet for her anger and a respite from being forced to endure four to hours of religious teaching a day at Catholic school.
"From the minute I learned who Marilyn Manson was, I became obsessed," she says. "And I was super obsessed with The Exorcist, and I was really obsessed with paganism and horror stuff as it related to Catholic stuff. So as soon as I heard Marilyn Manson's music and my mom said, 'This is terrible,' I needed to know everything about him. When I started high school, I shaved off all my hair and dressed in all black and decided I would be a goth. So on the first day, the friends I made were all based on the fact that we listened to Green Day and Marilyn Manson. It was always a super musically oriented thing. Though it came out of my feelings toward Catholicism, I think that turned into me obsessing over music. If you show up at school wearing all black and wearing a Mohawk, you're probably only going to hang out with people who want to be your friends. Because those social things are so associated with image, and the image is so associated with your code of ethics, those things all come together."
All the while, she dreamed of life after high school, biding her time before she could travel across the country to study Russian literature and neuroscience in Montréal at McGill University. Often the only girl in her science classes, she loved her studies but struggled with math, soaking up research on the complex interplay between human behavior and brain chemistry. And, when not working as a fundraising telemarketer for the school, she soaked up culture-music, literature, film. She was forming her creative vocabulary, but she still didn't know she'd ever get a chance to use it.
"I was living in this house where everyone made music, but I can't really play instruments," she admits. "Then people started using 404s, and I started getting into this electronic scene. Getting into the noise stuff and getting into pedals and 404s and doing production on computers is what got me into making music. It was like, 'Oh, I don't need to play guitar or piano. I can make music without playing instruments.' I was already singing backup for people, so I thought, well, I can sing and I can make a good beat, so I'll just rely on that. Fuck instruments and fuck everything else. The first time I made a song, I was completely addicted to it. It was like the best drug ever. As soon as [writing songs] was remotely possible, it overtook my entire existence, and it has been that way ever since." 
At that point, her music still largely consisted of drones and noise experiments, and she likely would have continued on that path if it wasn't for a road trip across Canada with her father in 2009. The two engaged in debates over the merits of different forms of music-the elder Boucher arguing in favor of Led Zeppelin, the younger Boucher preferring Animal Collective-but they found no common ground. That's when Mr. Boucher took a different approach.
"He was like, 'Do you like R&B?' and he threw on Mariah Carey," she recalls. "And I was like, 'What the fuck? How did I never get into this before?' I somehow had completely missed it. I mean, I'd heard it on the radio before, but it was just passively. So that was a turning point, and that's when I went back and tried to work on Geidi Primes. Especially vocally, I wanted to start using R&B style vocals, because I thought they were so beautiful. That's how I started getting into pop music, and it was fun because when I started playing it at shows, it would just shock people."
After finding a box of blank cassettes and a few tape decks that were discarded in an alley, she began recording her debut, Geidi Primes, a song cycle inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune sci-fi novels. The initial 30-cassette print run in 2010 spoke volumes of her commercial expectations, but the album ended up generating buzz on tastemaker blog Gorilla vs. Bear and soon became an underground sensation, praised for its shape-shifting vocals and moonlit sonic textures. In a milieu where writing songs with melodies was a radical gesture, she was a revolutionary.
"At first, the whole pop thing was kind of a joke," she says. "I came from a heavy noise loft show scene, and there's lots of drugs and these crazy performances. The first couple shows I played were with these super intense noise bands, like super atonal and weird. So when I started doing pop music, it was very radical in the scene that I was in. It was something no one else in the scene was doing. I thought, I could probably quit my job and make my living off pop music-I could probably do that. But in order to do that, I have to accept all these things that are happening to me and not just ignore them and not just make fun of them and push them outside. Because I do love pop music. It's not like I don't. So it was like, 'OK. I'm going to take pop music seriously now.' I think that has been
a big change in the mandate of the project."
To her surprise, her Grimes project was almost instantly accepted and celebrated by the Montréal art community, her songs turning up in DJ playlists and becoming the soundtrack for local dance parties. Her second full-length release, Halfaxa, followed before the year was over and was received with similar enthusiasm. Her music was entrancing and odd, a beguiling amalgam of R&B falsettos and darkly enveloping synth textures, and Boucher was soon given the opportunity to open up for Swedish pop star Lykke Li, on a tour that took her from playing in front of 200 people to 2,000 to 3,000 nightly. The problem was, Boucher had been using her performances to mostly play improvised drone music and hadn't yet worked out the logistics of constructing an entire set out of her more conventionally melodic material. Every night was a gamble, she says, with the prospect of a panic attack derailing her before she could finish the set. For someone who was then still uncomfortable talking to people she didn't know, she had to learn in a hurry.
"It didn't force me to grow up," she says, "it was just like, 'Shut up and do it. You can't fuck up in front of that many people. You don't have that option.' It was like, 'OK. You have to make the songs. You can't just play the drones.' It was then that I decided to cater to an audience that would be receptive to a more pop kind of thing."
With primitive versions of Visions tracks "Genesis" and "Nightmusic" in her set, she began to realize that her most melodic material was getting the most immediate and enthusiastic response. By the end of the tour, her shows were turning into rave parties, and she was ready to translate what she had learned into the writing and recording of Visions. She had a blueprint for the album-a collision of TLC and Korean pop music-but it was a struggle from the start. She battled crippling writer's block, unsure of how to move forward. When she did, the results fell well short of what she was intending. She knew what she wanted to do; she just hadn't developed the musical vocabulary to do it yet.
Boucher learned a valuable lesson, though. First, she needed to tap into the ugliest and most troubling events of her life to make her music vibrant and cathartic. Second, to reach that state she needed to completely isolate herself from the outside world, to the point of putting herself into nine days of solitary confinement while making Visions. Finally, she needed to be uncomfortable, physically or emotionally, to stay creatively vital, and isolating herself and revisiting painful past events facilitated that condition. When she emerged she had pushed herself further toward conventional pop structures and melodies than she had gone before, an evolution that she seems at once proud of accomplishing and eager to prove was a legitimate creative choice.
"You look at a lot of my peers, like How to Dress Well or Elite Gymnastics, a couple of years ago they were making noise music," she says. "Pop music, R&B, hip-hop-there are innovators there. I think OutKast is the best example of that from the past few years. I think the fact that people can engage with that, or that music critics are a lot more accepting of that stuff from a critical perspective, is really cool. There's a lot of shitty rap and shitty pop music. And Max Martin and all these people-you can look at [writing pop music] as if it's easy. But it's actually really hard to make a pop song, because they are all so similar, it's such a subtle thing to make a pop song that stands out. You need to be so intelligent and self-aware. It's all about tone. It's not anything else. It's so reliant on the strengths of the writer, and the performer has to be exceptionally awesome. They can be so simple and so upfront that you can't hide behind anything. You can't hide behind crazy production or anything. It's straight up. That's why it's hard."
That she has mastered her craft so quickly is a testament to her instincts as a writer, and her inability to create what she wants is essentially what makes her music so unique, the weird contaminants in her pop stew giving it most of its flavor. But despite having just completed a year that would be an unmitigated success by almost any measure, she's not sure this is the career that she wants. She has a plan, though, and it just might involve all those songs on her hard drive that she refuses to show anyone. 
"For the first couple albums, they were conceptually...whatever," she says. "They were a bunch of songs. Now, I'm getting better about being like, 'OK, this album is conceptually about this thing.' I can finally see how the songs engage with each other.
"But I'm not really a front person," she says surprisingly. "I'm doing it now, but I can't do this for more than a few more years. So I'd like to develop a back catalog of songs that I could send to, like, Rihanna or something. I can write songs that are shameless pop songs, but it's not Grimes. I don't have the mandate to do that as Grimes." 
You're Faced With Something That Could Consume You Completely
Even if we live in a "post-Internet" era, many artists-especially those for whom indie cred still holds some sway-either flatly deny that they ever consider the commercial implications of their creative choices or grudgingly acknowledge that such concerns are necessary evils. Boucher has no such hang-ups. In fact, she openly acknowledges that she is fairly obsessed (and "obsessed" is the word that she uses for almost everything that grabs her attention; she seemingly has no casual interests) with the history of popular music, spending hours analyzing the elements that make certain music popular in certain eras. She knows what makes a pop hit, but she's also unsparingly self-critical.
"I feel like I could, if I wanted to, make mainstream pop, but I'm not really capable of going onstage and doing a sexy dance," she says. "I'd get really nervous. If I was really fucking good at something-if I was really good at playing the piano-I would play the piano all the time. But I'm not really good at anything that has to do with the live show. I'd much rather engineer a pop star more than anything else. I would love to do that. But I'd love to make pop music that isn't about being sexy. Or a pop star who sang songs about really fucked up things."
She doubts her ability to do that, though, and it's probably true that Mariah Carey and Beyoncé wouldn't necessarily be a good fit for "songs about really fucked up things." She can't think about these things too much, she says, or she will work herself into a state of creative paralysis. Her insecurities are even worse when she sits down to write music for Grimes, so she circumvents those anxieties by tricking herself into believing that she's writing music for other artists, "fake bands," as she calls them. In these moments, it doesn't matter if Beyoncé records one of her songs as long as that mental sleight of hand gets the song written. But if Boucher doesn't think she has what it takes to be a worldwide pop star, she also knows she doesn't want to be one, either. In fact, she's not even convinced she wants to be a public figure at all.
"I like performing; I'm down with it," she says. "But playing the same songs over and over again, I don't find that to necessarily be the most creative thing. And I hate going through immigration and borders and passports. I hate heights and planes, and I can't go on a plane without having a panic attack. I have to hide under my jacket the whole time. So traveling a lot is really difficult for me on the most basic level. By the time I'm 30, I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be a model and having to do photo shoots. A lot of people really want to be onstage. A lot of people are really good at singing live and awesome at dancing, and they're really good at getting their picture taken and that's what they're passionate about. But I want to be the guy at the record company that's writing hits and doing the choreography. I love doing all this stuff, and I love pop music, and I love the entertainment industry. I'm just not an entertainer." 
That's probably news for anyone who has seen one of her live shows. It's hard to imagine that someone with no natural ability as an entertainer could draw 15,000 people to one of her performances, as Boucher did at 2012's Primavera Festival. Looking out over that crowd is the sort of moment that forever changes a person, she says, and she has started to think differently about her Grimes project and the extent to which she can disentangle herself from it. Fame does come with some inconvenience- she has to be careful not to say anything too controversial in interviews, and she can't go to a party in New York City without having to sign autographs-but she believes that playing with public perceptions is an art-form, something she has begun to explore if only as a way to protect herself.
"I was really adamant about the fact that me and Grimes are exactly the same thing," she begins. "Putting on a persona-I really don't like that idea. But most people aren't going to read my interviews, most people don't know anything about me, most people didn't even know that I had records before Visions. So I've come to realize that the way that I present myself publicly needs to be the simplified version of what I am. A lot of the stuff I'm saying [on records], I'd have to know the person really well to even say those things to them. So there's this level of distance you need to have to put out music, because it's so intense emotionally that you want to get away from it because it's so intense and exposed. I don't want to put on a persona, but I definitely like to be able to escape from what Grimes is and be something on my own without that. When it becomes Grimes, Grimes, Grimes-does my identity need to be synonymous with my art project? Because I do other things in my life, and I like to be anonymous and chill out and play video games with my friends and do stuff that has nothing to do with my career. So it's kind of hard for me to get away from Grimes as this entity, and the more abstract and simplified the idea of Grimes is, the easier. Because you're going to get criticism and get shit on, and you need to be able to recognize that the thing they are shitting on is your art project and that you have value as a person outside of that."
See You on a Dark Night
It's three weeks later, and Boucher seems genuinely excited, talking so fast that she is stuttering. She is set to leave for her first tour in Australia and New Zealand, and all the talk about being afraid of flying or being a bad performer is gone. She is now settled in at her new place in Squamish, a large house with a giant backyard where bears occasionally wander. With a few close friends, this is where she has escaped to work on her next batch of songs, living in a house that's so cold that she says they don't even use the refrigerator. "It's funny, because I specifically moved out of Montréal to be out of subzero temperatures," she laughs. "And this is where I am."
She has made some progress on her "industrial country" album since the last time we spoke, but she says the project is in flux and that she spent 12 hours the previous day recording hundreds of vocal takes for her developing demos. Using Enya as a reference point, she is attempting to create a chorus of voices that sound nearly identical, an eerie army of atmospheric clones. She has also moved on to a new obsession: Taylor Swift.
"It's hard, though, because the country thing is hard to do without it sounding stupid," she says. "So that's a tricky thing. But I love the texture of Patsy Cline stuff. And as far as production goes, I've been testing more of doing the Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber stuff. The Taylor Swift album, the production is amazing. It's some of the best production I've ever heard. It's so clean and clear but still aggressive."
That is her goal for her new tracks-to make something that sounds clean and well-produced- and she has been consumed with creating something that will sound more professional and accomplished than her previous releases. More than performing-even more than writing, it seems-this is where her passion lies these days, and her speech quickens when she talks about the new equipment she has purchased and the struggle she has with keeping herself from becoming overwhelmed with the array of options she never knew existed. As a result, she is progressing slowly, with only a few finished songs that she knows will be on her future release, but she already has a concept for the rest of the album.
"When I came back to B.C., I got a rush of everything from my past," she says. "I've been having this intense nostalgia, and I'm very interested in this concept of nostalgia, because it's horrifying. I'm constantly in places that I haven't been since I was a 16-year-old drug addict. A lot of my friends are dead or junkies, so everything is very polarized. There's nothing that I look at and it's neutral. It seems like a powerful thing to be accessing for a record."
Aside from being a frozen, isolated spot where she could write songs with few outside interferences, there's another reason Boucher ended up in Squamish, though. Her grand- parents, rugged survivalists who helped raise her during her early childhood, are ailing and have moved into an assisted living facility. If she needs to be uncomfortable to make a good album, she's in the right place.
"They always lived in a motor home and my grandpa has a bunch of guns," she explains, "and when I stayed with them he always made me sleep with a gun under the pillow. It was super intense all the time. But my grandma just went blind and they moved into an old folks' community.
"It's depressing," she sighs. "They're slowing down, and it's intense to watch. That's one of the reasons I'm here. I want to be chilling with them. I would hate it if they died in the next couple years to not have spent as much time with them as I could. That's an intense thing to be happening here now, too. But it's just a cool thing to be accessing. It's really hard for me to write music neutrally. If I want it to be really good, it needs to emotionally intense. So sometimes I need to force myself into situations that are emotionally intense if I want it to be really good."
The question that remains tantalizingly unanswered is just what constitutes "good" music in the post-Internet era, as the previous tensions between different aesthetics, as subjective and superficial as they might be, at least made it far easier to know where those lines were drawn. That those lines are fading over time is doubtlessly a positive for forcing listeners to evaluate music based on its merits alone, but those old tensions still exist colliding inside Boucher every time she sits down to write a song. As a person who wants nothing more than to write pop music but struggles to know how to maneuver through those old minefields-either because she doesn't believe she should, doesn't believe she can, or doesn't believe she really wants to-she is proof that even an artist who is representative of a new paradigm has to deal with the same old concerns. Even a post-Internet artist has to take precautions.
"If I made a record that sounded just like the Taylor Swift record, I would have failed. People would just be like, 'Uh, it sounds just like the Taylor Swift record.' Ultimately, I don't want to make a record that sounds like that. But it's like trying to achieve something that's really ambitious, knowing that you'll fail but still trying as hard as you can. In your failure, you'll still end up in a great place..." she says, sounding conflicted again. "I think."
GRIMES
Recontextualized Pop
Words by Matt Fink 
In a way, making a straightforward pop album for an indie rock audience is one of the safest moves an artist can make. Those who listen to only Top 40 pop aren't too likely to ever hear it and if indie audiences don't like it, well, they weren't really supposed to anyway. What Claire Boucher does as Grimes is far more dangerous. By boldly and unrepentantly recontextualizing pop music as her modus operandi, she is making music that has to be held to those high standards of accessibility and immediacy while also retaining the experimental nature of independent music. Now, working on the follow-up to her 2012 breakthrough Visions, Boucher has moved into the mountains of Squamish, British Columbia, a small town that provides the isolation she says she needs to create her art. Speaking from her house in the woods, Boucher offers an overview of her new recording experiments, explains her creative process, and describes how her rustic environment is influencing the tone of her new work.[Note: These are extra portions of our interview, quotes that didn't make it into our main print issue article on Grimes.]
Matt Fink (Under the Radar): So you're taking some time off from touring because of hearing problems. Are you OK?
Clair Boucher: I think I might have some permanent problems. It was just a matter of taking an actual break so that I didn't aggravate the extent of the permanent problems. I have tinnitus and stuff. It's not just from this. When I was in high school I had a Walkman and I listened to it all day every day on full blast for five years. It's just the culmination of my entire life of listening to music irresponsibly loud.
Is it difficult working on new tracks knowing that they will be a follow-up to an album that was as well-received as Visions?
Now that I know a lot more about production, it's suddenly so much harder to produce a song. When I didn't know that I was necessarily doing something wrong or that I could do something better, it seemed easy to throw everything together. The more I learn the longer it takes to do anything, because I'm suddenly aware of all of this stuff that would make it better. I'm probably getting way too obsessive about mixing.
Is the issue that you don't know what you want to do or that you now have so many options you don't know which one to go with?
I know what to do. It's like technical stuff. Right now there are no effects on the vocals whatsoever-but I'm trying to do this
thing where I'm trying to do 10 layers of vocals, but they're super identical so you can't actually tell. There's no effects on them and they're panned everywhere, so it's weird. You know how Enya uses 300 vocal layers, but it sounds like one voice? It's like that, but not using any effects or anything and using less vocal layers. But you need to do 400 vocal takes for every line, because if you're off half a note or half a beat, it ruins the whole effect. So I spent 12 hours doing that last night. [Laughs]
So the effect is really atmospheric and ethereal?
Yeah. With my older music, I used so much reverb and delay, and I like the atmospheric quality but I felt like it made it really muddy and made it harder to make a pop banger. I love that ethereal effect, but I still want the bass to be really clear and I want everything to be clean. I feel like this way it has that quality but it's much cleaner, and it's also something I don't think I've heard anyone do. It's not super overtly in your face, but it really gives it a different sound. If I can pull this off on this record... I don't know. [Laughs]
Would you say these new tracks push further in the pop direction than what you've done previously?
I think so. It might be pop, yeah. I want the production to be professional quality. I want someone to hear the record and feel like it was produced by a professional. I don't mind if it's weird in itself, I just want it to be really good. In the same way that Nine Inch Nails wasn't necessarily mainstream pop, but the production was top of the line. I want the production to be top of the line to the point where it could flirt with those kinds of sonics, but it doesn't need to be really boring. Not that all pop music is boring. But I want it to do other things, I guess.
Are you using the same recording equipment?
I'm actually using completely different equipment, which is interesting. I've got the same keyboard, but I'm using a preamp and stuff. I'm using a lot of sample packs, and I've been playing the guitar [laughs]... so, yeah.
Has there been any backlash from your old fans due to your breakthrough with Visions? 
A little bit. I feel like that's really immature. It's hard because I think people think that sometimes because my records are getting progressively more pop that it means that I'm selling out, but I just really like pop music and I wasn't a good producer before. And the better you get at production, the more pop things are going to sound. I don't really get that thing of only being able to like an artist if they're under a certain level of popularity.
When would you say that turn toward pop music started in your music?
On the Lykke Li tour, I got to play off an audience and figure out what worked and what didn't, and it was the more coherent stuff [that worked]. I started playing the songs that were the most like pop songs, because those were the ones that the crowd worked with the best, so that was my live set by the time I was doing the Lykke Li tour. It was a very pop live set. It's just one of those things where the better you get technically, the more fun it is to do. Playing improvised drone music is cool, but there's a point where the challenge of having to do a complete set-that's more difficult to do and requires a certain level of skill and memorization of parts-becomes a thing.
Did you have most of the stuff from Visions already written by the time you did that tour? 
No, but I had "Night Music" and "Genesis." I had those instrumentals-not the versions that are on the record, but shittier versions of them. And those were the ones that made an impact. I actually wasn't going to put those on the record, but my manager and my friends forced me to do it.
Has your increased public profile changed the way you approach your social life? 
Sometimes it's hard to go to parties. I don't really like going to parties that much, unless they're with people that I know anyway. I think, overall, it's pretty good. I guess the uncomfortable thing is that I can't go to a party in New York anymore, because if I do I end up signing autographs, which is the worst.
You've talked about writing songs for pop stars. Would you say your goal is to have your songs recorded by someone like Beyoncé or Mariah Carey?
I need to make them better, because I feel like the standard is very high, generally. I'm closing in on signing a publishing deal, and I want to start writing topline. Producers will have beats and I'll come in and suggest different vocal lines that could go over top. I'm pretty excited to get into stuff like that, because it's extremely easy for me and really fun.
And then you wouldn't have to deal with the parts of your job that you don't like, right? How long would you like to keep touring and doing publicity and all of that?
Not after I'm 30, I think. That's sort of my cutoff point, because after that point I'll be tired. The aspects of this thing that are the worst are all the ones that are associated with my image or having to be the focal point. Photo shoots, they aren't horrible, but they're probably the worst part of the job. And the critique that comes with having to be in front of people. It's kind of sexist, but everyone is always talking shit about you, and it would be nice to be able to step back and not have to engage with that side of things.
Does that pressure to maintain this perfect visual presentation exist even in the indie world?
I think there's a degree of that, indie-wise. I don't really care too much, but it's hard. The other day... never mind, I can't tell you that story. I keep saying things in interviews that are really stupid, and my manager is always like, "What the fuck?" So I'm trying not to tell journalists things that are funny to write about but make me look like an idiot.
Fair enough. I imagine being in the woods in Canada helps create some distance be- tween you and your public life. How are you enjoying life in Squamish?
We actually have a whole house. It's really awesome. It's super cheap and it's huge. Right now there's three of us here, but my other friend is moving here soon. It's just massive. Our backyard is huge and there's bear warnings everywhere. You can't put out the garbage because the bears will come! It's this big house in this really remote location. But the heating system is from the 1960s, so it doesn't work. It's this totally obsolete type of heating, and there's only one guy in all of B.C. that knows how to deal with it and it's kind of expensive. So we haven't had heat, but it's below freezing. And we're in the mountains. Everything is frozen. The fridge-we don't need a fridge. I just leave stuff out, because it doesn't matter.
Do those conditions influence the sounds on the record?
It's definitely icier. I didn't want it to be so blue in tone, but it sort of is getting like that.
Has living near where you grew up influenced the writing on the record? 
Just the concept of nostalgia in general is something that is romanticized and tragic. I'm constantly being confronted by these situations, where I'll drive by something and I'll be so sad that it's gone and so excited that I'm in the vicinity of where that thing happened. I had a really crazy teen years period, and it is super intense to come back to that. It has the associations of all these crazy things that I did there.
Sounds like this is going to be a fairly dark album.
It's going to be more depressing than I wanted it to be. I think I really wanted it to be like the Taylor Swift album, but it never will be. It's like Visions. I wanted Visions to be like TLC meets K-pop, but it ended up going somewhere different. There's always this idea-this perfect thing that I want to get, but it never happens.
So when you're working you have this blueprint in your head for where you want to take the album?
It's weird because I have to walk this fine line of not trying too hard, because if I'm intending to do something I'll almost never accomplish it. So I need to trick my brain. It's like when I read my horoscope, I'm like "Oh, no! I'm going to get in a fight on Wednesday," even though I don't consciously believe in my horoscope, but I sort of subconsciously do. Or maybe I subconsciously don't believe in my horoscope, but consciously I pretend that I do and convince myself of it so that I read it regularly but also think that it's stupid. But I have to do that when I'm working on music, too. I have to be like, "Oh, this song, I'm going to try as hard as I can to make it like this," but I know that I can't. I'm aware that I don't want to make a song that sounds like a Taylor Swift song, but I know that if I tell myself that I'm going to make a song that sounds like a Taylor Swift song, it's going to end up weird. It's hard to describe the process, but it's something that I do.
Well, I guess if you have a distinct sound that innately your own, you'll always sound like yourself no matter what you try to do. 
Yeah. I have a bunch of fake projects, and I'll often make music for my other bands, quote unquote. That's the only way that I can make something. It's really hard for me to make music under pressure, so if I'm like, "Oh, no. It's Grimes. Everyone is going to judge it," then I usually can't make anything good. But I'm like, "Oh, this is just a dumb pop song for my dumb pop project," it tends to be better.Category:InterviewCategory:2013