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===Interviewhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/28/pop-for-misfits===
Pop for Misfits
Can a former noise musician become a star?
By Kelefa Sanneh
September 21, 2015
It takes two hours and forty-five minutes to get from Los Angeles to San Diego by train, and a little longer than that if there is a mechanical delay, which on this day there was. Claire Boucher, curled up in a window seat on the train’s non-ocean-view side, didn’t seem to mind, or even notice. It was July, 2014, and, because she hates flying and doesn’t relish driving, she was heading, slowly, to Comic-Con, which attracts huge numbers of geeks, many of whom bring along their alter egos. Boucher’s alter ego is Grimes, the name under which, since 2009, she has been producing and singing home-brewed electronic music that is irreducibly weird but insistently pop, a term that describes both its sound and, increasingly, its reception. She fills tents at festivals, and this summer she toured with Lana Del Rey; her music videos have amassed tens of millions of views on YouTube. That weekend, CraveOnline, a media company aimed at young men, had hired Boucher—or, rather, Grimes—to be the celebrity d.j. at a party aboard the U.S.S. Midway, a decommissioned aircraft carrier moored in San Diego Bay.
“Should my d.j. set be more chill?” Boucher wondered, not for the first time. (“Chill,” one of her favorite adjectives, can mean “mellow” or “good” or, most often, both.) “Or more dance?” She was thinking about songs, as she almost always is.
The intensity of Boucher’s musical obsessions can make her seem like a mad pop scientist. On her bustling Tumblr page, she keeps track of her research into a cultural universe that seems, like its physical counterpart, to be expanding at an increasing rate. Her followers might encounter a snippet from the Japanese soundtrack composer Yoko Kanno, or a fan-made video set to the music of the electronic producer Aphex Twin, or a recent Selena Gomez single—which, Boucher has discovered, sounds particularly arresting in a car equipped with subwoofers. In her own songs, Boucher takes delight in rewriting the old music-industry story of the female performer in the spotlight and the male mastermind behind the curtain. “It’s like I’m Phil Spector, and then there’s Grimes, which is the girl group,” she says. She got her start in Montreal, part of an underground experimental-music scene, but now she herself is the experiment, as she tries to figure out what “pop star” means in 2015, and whether she might become one.
For the moment, many of Boucher’s fans come from the world of indie rock, which has championed her as a new kind of pop auteur. One of her signature songs is “Oblivion,” an upbeat but ominous dance track; Boucher doesn’t sing it so much as haunt it. “Oblivion” never appeared on any Billboard chart, but last year Pitchfork, the definitive indie publication, called it the best song of the decade so far, which was a complicated sort of compliment. “Oblivion” was a great choice to top the Pitchfork list precisely because it was not an obvious choice.
These days, Boucher seems fascinated by the idea of making music that is as direct—as obvious—as the pop songs she loves. She acquired some important allies in 2013, when she signed with Roc Nation, the artist-management company founded by Jay Z, which counts Kanye West and Shakira among its clients. But Boucher still records for a small label, 4AD, which gives her freedom from just about any imperative except the financial one—she can’t afford not to think practically about her career. She had accepted the nautical d.j. gig to fund her next music video. But it also gave her an excuse to go to Comic-Con, where she hoped to bump into someone from “Game of Thrones,” the HBO series. “Every season, there’s a wedding, and they have a band play,” she said. “I really want to do it. ” She looked across the aisle at Lauren Valencia, a Roc Nation executive who was travelling with her.
“It has to happen,” Valencia said, playing along. “You might have to dye your hair, though—dark brown.”
“I’ll do it,” Boucher said. Her hair was bleached Khaleesi white, with a swath of purplish brown near her shoulders, and she was wearing clothes that marked her as someone with no particular fear of standing out: a slouchy men’s pin-striped blazer with short sleeves; baggy tuxedo pants; Adidas sandals with socks; round-lensed reflective sunglasses; and, on her sternum, an uneven coating of rainbow glitter. Her style is an imaginative elaboration of goth, drawing influences from gutter punk, high fashion, and Japanese culture. (She carries a fuzzy gray purse in the likeness of Totoro, the friendly spirit from a Hayao Miyazaki film.) The electronic producer known as d’Eon, who became friends with Boucher in Montreal, says that she has always had a knack for self-presentation; in the old days, she kept a tattoo gun in her bag, so that she could embellish herself whenever the mood struck. “I’ve met people that have never met her, that have the same hand tattoos that she has, just because they think it’s cool,” he says. More recently, Boucher has become an occasional presence in the fashion world. Karl Lagerfeld proclaimed her “fresh,” and dressed her in Chanel for the 2013 Met Gala. She is gangly enough to fit into sample sizes, and she has found fashion magazines to be surprisingly congenial—all that matters is that she look cool.
Boucher has a hard time censoring herself in interviews, or on social media, which means that she provides a steady stream of content for music Web sites, whose readers love to express their sharply differing opinions of her. “I feel like if I read about myself from the media I would hate me,” she says. “I’d be, like, ‘Fuck that bitch!’ ” Online, she has shared not only her enthusiasms but also her frustration with the music industry, where “women feel pressured to act like strippers and its ok to make rape threats but its not ok to say your a feminist.” Her outspokenness has helped to make her something of a role model. Musicians are now expected to advertise their political beliefs, but Boucher is unusually thoughtful and passionate about social injustice and environmental degradation. (She travels with a canteen, and has essentially banned plastic water bottles from her tour bus.) One particularly trenchant Tumblr post, from 2013, earned a vigorous endorsement from Spin, under the headline “grimes’ anti-sexism manifesto is required reading (even if you’re not a fan).” That last phrase hints at what is, for Boucher, a disquieting possibility: that her online presence might be even more popular, and more influential, than her music.
This predicament owes a lot to Boucher’s painstaking and intensely self-critical creative process. “Visions,” the album containing “Oblivion,” was released in January, 2012, and Grimes fans have been waiting ever since for the follow-up. The few tracks that Boucher has released, to keep them patient, seem to have had the opposite effect: “REALiTi,” a warm and hazy eighties-inspired song about disillusionment, appeared online earlier this year, to general acclaim, but Boucher now downplays it, saying, “It’s not that great.” She has mixed feelings about lyrics, although she recognizes that they are an important part of nearly every hit in history. Often, she conceals her voice behind reverb, a very un-pop thing to do: radio programmers usually reward the kind of clarity that can be found more reliably in Boucher’s social-media posts than in her songs. “REALiTi” comes from an album that Boucher recorded and then scrapped—it was too “disturbing,” she says, and she decided that she wouldn’t feel right disseminating such a hopeless message.
Boucher is twenty-seven, and the extended waiting period since “Visions” has now consumed more than half of her short career. She knows that her new album—her first since signing with Roc Nation—will be scrutinized not only by her fans but also by lots of people wondering whether she deserves all the attention she gets. Although she has not announced an exact release date, it is expected to arrive sometime in the next month or two. She sees it as her first proper album; all her other releases, she says, have been rushed and unfinished.
Last year, she moved to Los Angeles, settling not in one of the fashionable enclaves but in the Valley; after a few months, she was able to drive well enough to get herself downtown without hyperventilating. She learned how to play guitar and violin, and how to use Ableton Live, one of the standard music-production programs. Online, she provided irregular updates, which sometimes doubled as advice to aspiring pop stars:
getting into this technique where i record a vocal take on my super crappy old 80 $ live mic from like 2 years ago and then do a take on my nice mic and blend them together . . . and if u want a nice chorus doing like 2 other vocal takes on a good mic and mixing them super low and panned L, R 50% both ways creates a kool effect, like dolly parton meets bikini kill. For a time, her interest in production threatened to overwhelm the process of writing. “I got too technical,” she said. “Now I’m in the middle area, which is right between technical and, like, vibe.” She likes figuring out what makes songs work, even though she knows that theoretical explanations are always unsatisfying. On the wall of her home studio, she keeps a version of “The Golden Rules of Pop,” formulated by the prankish British electronic duo KLF:
1: IT MUST HAVE A DANCE GROOVE THAT RUNS ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE RECORD
2: NO LONGER THAN 3:30
3: INTRO -> VERSE -> CHORUS -> VERSE -> CHORUS -> BREAKDOWN -> DOUBLE CHORUS -> OUTRO
She doesn’t necessarily follow these precepts, but she doesn’t want to forget them, either—a paradox that sometimes makes her sound ambivalent about her big moment. “I like building expectations, and then stressing people out by explicitly not doing the thing,” she says.
One of the people accompanying Boucher to San Diego was her boyfriend, James Brooks, a fellow-musician (he was formerly half of a duo called Elite Gymnastics) and an equally avid student of popular culture, though one who vibrates at a lower frequency. Their relationship began a few years ago, with an argument at a mutual friend’s house, sparked by a televised countdown of Britney Spears’s sexiest songs. Boucher was adamant that “. . . Baby One More Time,” with its schoolgirl-skirt video, couldn’t possibly be ranked the sexiest, given that Spears was only sixteen when it was released. Brooks, more cynical, insisted that it would be, despite the unsettling implications. Boucher turned out to be right; more important, Brooks was graceful in defeat. “Everyone was, like, ‘Oh, he’s smarter than you, you’re not going to like him, he’ll be able to defeat all your stupid arguments,’ ” Boucher recalls. “But he’s the only dude I’ve ever dated who won’t give me shit for beating him at things.”
On the train, Boucher had seemed excited about her d.j. set, but by the time she and Brooks boarded the aircraft carrier she had started to feel distinctly un-chill. In the cabin that served as the greenroom, she opened her laptop and plugged in a pair of studio-grade headphones, clicking anxiously through the songs in her library.
“I think you’re overthinking it,” Brooks said.
Boucher looked at him. “My last d.j. set was the worst experience of my life,” she said. The previous summer, she had been invited to Ibiza to spin at Boiler Room, a roving party devoted to unimpeachably underground electronic dance music. She played distinctly unhip tracks like “We Like to Party,” the jaunty 1998 dance-pop hit by Vengaboys, and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” (It was August.) She says that the attendees enjoyed themselves, but the party was also broadcast online, and the reaction on Twitter was brutal. One typical post accused Boucher of “awful, disgusting trolling.” She responded that her selections had been sincere: “Nothing about anything I do is ironic.”
When Brooks tried to reassure her that this set would be easier, she said, “I just don’t want any more scandal, or any more death threats. It was terrifying, actually. And I didn’t get a d.j. gig for a year.”
The audience on the Midway turned out to be nothing like the one at Boiler Room. An m.c. pointed out the celebrities in attendance: “I saw Tom Green walking around!” And while a couple of dozen Grimes fans crowded around the d.j. booth, including a blue-haired Harry Potter in a pleated gray skirt, they were outnumbered by hundreds of oblivious junketeers. Despite the July heat, Boucher insisted, again, on playing “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and this time people cheered. Boucher was delighted, until she realized that they were applauding a pair of parachutists who had landed, spotlit, on the flight deck.
Boucher’s career has been propelled by, and has helped to propel, a changing attitude in the community that surrounds what used to be called indie rock. The term once denoted both an economic ecosystem (small labels, crammed record stores) and a sound (tousled, punk-derived). But lately a musical world defined by its distance from the mainstream has adopted a more conciliatory attitude. Few acts these days make a show of shunning commercial success, perhaps because, after a decade of turmoil, the corporate-pop monolith no longer seems so monolithic. Lady Gaga blazed a trail for truculent pop stars by treating her own celebrity as an evolving art project. More recently, Sia promoted a hit album while refusing to show her face to cameras or crowds. “I don’t wanna go out and sell my soul, my body, my peace of mind,” she said, and evidently she didn’t have to.
The gap between indie rock and mainstream R. & B., in particular, has narrowed considerably: Caroline Polachek, of the band Chairlift, earned a writing and producing credit on the last Beyoncé album; Pitchfork tracks Frank Ocean and the Weeknd as intently as it does any rock band; and one of the most acclaimed new indie acts of recent years is a British singer known as FKA Twigs, whose skeletal, hypnotic abstractions are derived, however distantly, from slow jams. Last year, in an interview with Salon, A. C. Newman, of the Old Guard indie band the New Pornographers, took note of the changing climate. “A lot of what is considered hugely cool, popular indie rock these days sounds like nineties R. & B.,” he said. “Like, it doesn’t even sound like indie rock.”
This revolution—if that’s what it is—remains incomplete, as Boucher discovered when she used Tumblr to post her provisional list of the greatest songs of all time. The list, which ranged from Beyoncé to the shadowy British producer Burial, was a characteristically canny mixture of new and old, mainstream and marginal. When some readers scoffed, Boucher responded with an aesthetic statement of purpose, enumerating the feminist virtues of Beyoncé and the anti-racist significance of “Gangnam Style,” the global blockbuster by the Korean star PSY. She reminded readers that her music wouldn’t exist without the pop stars who inspired it. “The first time I heard mariah carey it shattered the fabric of my existence and I started Grimes,” she wrote.
Boucher’s argument is complicated by her own career, which has been driven by the kind of idealism that mainstream pop stars must typically forgo. Exposure to the corporate music industry has only underscored her skepticism about the way it operates; she declines offers to collaborate with established producers and songwriters, which she sees as backhanded compliments, of a sort rarely paid to similarly accomplished male musicians. “That makes me feel really weird,” Boucher says. She produces and writes all Grimes songs herself, and engineers them, too; she recently taught herself how to insure that a drum machine she likes will sound equally good coming through night-club speakers and earbuds. “I can’t use an outside engineer,” she says. “Because, if I use an engineer, then people start being, like, ‘Oh! That guy just did it all.’ ” Beneath the surface of Boucher’s love of pop lies a political critique. “It’s a mostly male perspective—you’re mostly hearing male voices run through female performers,” she says. “I think some really good art comes of it, but it’s just, like, half the population is not really being heard.”
In San Diego, Boucher’s celebrity was powerful enough to let her skip the line at the “Game of Thrones” virtual-reality exhibit, which she found so seductive as to be slightly alarming. (“I felt an incredible yearning to go back into it forever,” she later wrote on Twitter.) But it was not sufficient to prevent her from freezing in the presence of George R. R. Martin, the author of the “Game of Thrones” books, whom she was introduced to at a Comic-Con party. A mutual friend told Martin, “This is Grimes, the next Lady Gaga.” Martin grasped Boucher’s hand, but she was too nervous to do much besides gaze at his face and repeat the last thing she had heard.
“Gaga,” she said, quietly. “Gaga.”
When Boucher was a girl, she startled classmates at her Catholic school by telling them that she was the Devil; to prove it, she spider-walked backward down the stairs, like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” She grew up in Vancouver, tormented at school by peers who believed (not inaccurately) that she was kind of odd, and tussling at home with her four brothers. It was a strict household, and an accomplished one: her mother, Sandy Garossino, was a Crown Prosecutor and is now the editor-in-chief of the Vancouver Observer, an online publication; her father is an executive at a biotechnology company. Then, as now, Boucher was instinctively rebellious. At thirteen, she shaved her head, after which she found herself spending her days with fellow-outcasts: kids who were gay, kids who dressed strangely, kids who were obsessed with alternative music. Like socially marginalized high schoolers everywhere, Boucher developed a taste for Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, and Tool. This was music for teen-agers who got locked inside their high-school lockers—although the one time Boucher really did get locked inside her locker she thought, I can’t even feel bad about this, because it’s so cliché.
She moved to Montreal to attend McGill University, where she ranged through classes in neuroscience, philosophy, Russian, and electroacoustics. At one point, she devised a singularly impractical escape. With a friend, she travelled to Minnesota and constructed a houseboat; their sojourn ended when their new home was impounded by the local police, who considered it unsafe. Back in Montreal, she found a place in the city’s musical scene, which was in a rebuilding phase. In the early aughts, Montreal produced several big indie bands, none bigger than Arcade Fire. But by the decade’s end it seemed as if the launching-pad days had passed; what remained was a motley cohort of young people who often seemed to be making music for one another. Boucher, who didn’t think of herself as a musician, was pressed into service as a backing vocalist for Sean Nicholas Savage, a free-spirited songwriter, and then collaborated with an eerily intense crooner named Devon Welsh, who soon began recording under the name Majical Cloudz, and who was, for a time, Boucher’s roommate and boyfriend. Boucher began writing songs, performing live with a ukulele and then, as she taught herself the rudiments of electronic music, a cheap keyboard.
From the start, Boucher was a focal point: she had a proactive approach to making friends, which involved identifying interesting-looking people and then bombarding them with attention. One fellow-musician remembers receiving, within hours of meeting her, a voluminous e-mail about music and performance and “human communication writ large.” She began recording songs using GarageBand, the music program that comes preloaded on Apple computers. When she signed up for MySpace, she noticed that one of the options listed under “genre” was “grime.” The term connotes a streetwise British style, but she didn’t know that at the time, so she pluralized it and made it hers. Her first album was called “Geidi Primes,” and she considers it a sci-fi album, inspired by Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novels. A number of musicians in town were making so-called noise music, using instruments or electronics to push past conventions of melody and rhythm, and Boucher started a couple of noise groups. But she and a few friends also wanted to go the other way: they supplemented their diet of avant-garde music with regular doses of radio pop, and they came to view their relatively gentle, tuneful songs as small acts of radicalism, subverting the prevailing aesthetic of a radical scene.
Boucher’s love of mainstream pop has a defiant edge: she proclaims its virtues like a recent convert, which she is. Growing up, she wasn’t allowed to watch much television, and she didn’t pay close attention to the radio. Even now, she is constantly discovering gaps in her cultural knowledge. At a recent party thrown by the fashion label Rodarte, Boucher met one of her idols, the singer and musician Joanna Newsom. Later, Brooks mentioned Newsom’s husband, Andy Samberg, and Boucher had never heard of him. Brooks explained that he was a former member of the “Saturday Night Live” cast, known for absurd music videos such as a “Pirates of the Caribbean” spoof co-starring Michael Bolton—which meant that he had to explain who Michael Bolton was, too. Boucher’s love of singers like Mariah Carey isn’t, as you might think, a form of nostalgia, because most pop music, no matter how old, is relatively new to her. One of the first Grimes songs to attract online attention was “Vanessa,” which has a prodding bass line that gestures toward night clubs, and dead-eyed lyrics that evoke the zombie sentimentalism of millennial Top Forty: “Hey, hey, you want to play, but, baby, I can go and go / And every other day, you’re running off with so-and-so.”
By the time Boucher was ready to release “Visions,” in 2012, she had resolved to leave college and pursue music full time. Only half in jest, she proclaimed herself C.E.O. of Grimes Corp., and signed a record deal with the respected indie label 4AD. The album’s first single was “Genesis,” an elegant little song that paired indistinct lyrics—something about “my heart”—with simple melodic figures: an ascending synthesizer line, a descending vocal melody. (Years ago, she told an interviewer that the recordings for the album began during an all-night speed-fuelled binge, but she has since sought to have this admission removed from her Wikipedia page, so as not to glamorize drug abuse.) The song was a viral hit, and then came “Oblivion.” Boucher sang lightly and casually, as if she were reciting a nursery rhyme, but she later revealed that the lyrics describe an assault that she has called “one of the shattering experiences of my life”:
And never walk about after dark, it’s my point of view
’Cause someone could break your neck, coming up behind you, always coming, and you’d never have a clue
And now I look behind all the time, I will wait forever
Always looking straight, thinking, counting all the hours you wait.
Like many exceptional pop songs, this one had an ambiguous refrain—“See you on a dark night”—that allowed casual listeners to ignore the underlying narrative, something that Boucher found difficult. “I didn’t think the album would get popular,” she says. “And with ‘Oblivion,’ especially, I constantly have to think about this terrible thing that I never want to think about.” She has had to learn to hear “Oblivion” as her audience does—which is to say, to enjoy it. The music video, which Boucher co-directed, was shot at Percival Molson Stadium, on the campus of McGill, during a football scrimmage and a motocross race. Boucher, wearing large headphones while wandering through the throngs in the bleachers, sings and dances along to a song that only she can hear, looking very much as if she’s having fun.
Because Boucher is so recognizable, she tends to get recognized: one recent afternoon, at a restaurant in a suburban mall, a clean-cut young couple asked her to pose for a photograph with their baby. (“He listens to Grimes, too,” the mother said.) And so, when the doorbell rang one recent evening at her home, in the Valley, Boucher scurried out of view. There was no way to tell whether the man delivering Thai food was a Grimes fan, but she wasn’t inclined to take chances—she was living incognito on an unhip street, and hoping to keep it that way, so she stayed hidden while Brooks accepted a bag containing a few vegetarian curries. (Boucher generally doesn’t eat food made from animals, but she also resists absolutes, which has caused her a certain amount of trouble. At one point, she declared on her blog that she was taking a “one-day hiatus from veganism,” with the help of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s butterscotch ice cream; she heard back from a number of vegans who objected.) Brooks retrieved some bowls from the kitchen and set them up on a small table in the living room, where a wall was decorated with black-and-white photographs cut out from magazines: Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga in Versace, Beyoncé and Jay Z, Britney Spears, Erykah Badu, and an image from an old National Geographic article about Vikings. Boucher is an accomplished visual artist—she recently drew the cover for a pop-inspired comic book called The Wicked + The Divine—and she has a knack for pulling unlikely influences into her aesthetic world: even the oversized black Dixie Chicks T-shirt she was wearing that evening looked, somehow, a little bit goth.
When Boucher first arrived in California, she was thinking about retiring from performance. In the beginning, she had what she calls “a terrible reputation as a live act,” and the success of “Visions” led to engagements in front of crowds of thousands, which made Boucher anxious. She had always sung quietly, and in big rooms she found herself straining to belt out notes. “I would just cry all the time,” she says. “I’d be, like, ‘I can’t do it!’ ”
She thought about becoming a full-time songwriter, and took part in a few writing camps, where professionals get together to write songs to pitch to pop stars. With an old friend from Canada named Michael Diamond, who records as Blood Diamonds, she wrote a song called “Go,” which was intended for Rihanna, a fellow Roc Nation client. Rihanna didn’t record it, and so Boucher released her own version, last year, on the music-sharing site SoundCloud, where it quickly became one of her most popular songs. (Boucher doesn’t consider it a Grimes song, because she didn’t produce it herself.) “Go” offers one version of what it might mean for Boucher to go mainstream. The wispy, melancholy verse gives way to what is known, in electronic dance music, as a drop: an instrumental break, concussive but euphoric, which is enforced by booming kick drums. Some of her fans felt that the song was too commercial, a distinction that Boucher doesn’t entirely recognize: “Mike and I both put a lot of effort into it—but we made it to be bought.”
It is easy to imagine Boucher recording a few more songs like “Go” and claiming a place on the lucrative E.D.M. circuit. Instead, she worked on the “disturbing” album that she finished and then scrapped, and also spent a stretch living with Brooks in rural western Canada, which she thought would be productive. (It wasn’t.) Eventually, Boucher began to make some songs she liked, working at first in a converted bedroom in her California home. This past July, the room was dominated by a computer and a vocal preamplifier. A Mongolian flag hung on one wall, in tribute to Genghis Khan, with whom she had recently developed a complicated fixation. (She was still trying to decide how to measure his brilliance against his cruelty, and whether to include a song about him on the album.) On Twitter, she had been chronicling the difficult process of making a Grimes album. In January, she wrote, “now that indie music is obsessed with pop i feel completely bored by it.” Two months later, she hinted at a broader crisis of faith: “claire and grimes are completely different ppl at this point . . . and I can’t tell if I hate her.”
Boucher likes to say that her albums toggle between her two favorite literary genres, science fiction and fantasy. “ ‘Visions’ was sci-fi,” she says, recorded under the influence of high-tech pop stars like Beyoncé and Britney Spears. “And this album is fantasy,” inspired in part by Enya, the Irish singer who invented her own transfigured form of folk music. That night in the Valley, Boucher was just starting to get used to the idea of sharing this music with other people. She hadn’t yet allowed anyone from her record label to hear the songs, but that afternoon she had played some of them for Jay Z, who had been waiting for months. “Jay Z gave me a talk about being more confident when I play music,” Boucher said. “So I’m trying to implement that now.”
When she pressed Play, the sound that emerged was—Jay Z might have been relieved to hear—not obviously indebted to Enya. There was an easygoing hip-hop beat, intensified by snare rolls sampled from a marching band, and a playful keyboard line, the kind that you might pick out with one finger. Boucher’s vocals were pitched up, to make the song easier to sing onstage, where she often finds herself floating into her upper register. The song was “World Princess Part II,” a sequel of sorts to an old song of hers, a ghostly elegy called “World ♡ Princess.” Like many Grimes songs, this one is deceptive. The lyrics, which can be hard to decipher, slowly reveal themselves to be meaner than they first sound, taking aim at someone—maybe someone in Montreal—who underestimated her:
I know, most likely, how I used to be: a frail and silly thought in your mind
Call me unkind, you’re so far behind me
But I can’t see something more than the things you try to take
Now who made a mistake?
Another song, more punkish, sounded like a pop manifesto set to music: “Something you’re dismissive of is the reason I wake up.” But this recording was ineligible for the album, because Boucher didn’t write it: it was a cover of a track by Default Genders, Brooks’s current project. “The vocals are maybe kind of embarrassing,” Boucher said. “But they really liked it in the session.”
Brooks brightened—he was learning about this for the first time. “That’s all I need to hear,” he said. “If Jay Z likes my song, I’m good.”
The new songs were playful and pungent, and they seemed to change based on one’s frame of mind, like aural illusions. A number of them were as catchy as anything on the radio; one evoked the zippy charm of “Since U Been Gone,” by Kelly Clarkson. But they also sounded slightly alien, as if Boucher had resolved to obey the letter of pop-music law while declining to obey its spirit. The most lyric-driven song she played was her idea of a pop ballad—enlivened by an effervescent dancehall reggae beat. “It’s sonically as uncool as I could make it,” she said, proudly. “Kind of a hoedown vibe.” She pressed Pause. “And also Nine Inch Nails.” She pressed Play again, trying not to flinch as she heard her own voice: “The things they see in me, I cannot see myself / When you get bored of me, I’ll be back on the shelf.” Boucher likes to challenge—and sometimes torment—herself by resolving to do things she finds uncomfortable, like singing. For this song, which didn’t yet have a title, she had relied on non-technological assistance. “I took a couple of shots of tequila and did it—and ended up crying, alone, later in the night,” she said, then paused to listen. “I feel like this song needs Auto-Tune. Or maybe it would be better without alcohol.”
Today’s music industry is not particularly hospitable to shy performers. Singers must generally go on the road, where they can earn a reliable income to supplement the unreliable income from selling, streaming, and licensing their music. Boucher finds this arrangement uncomfortable, and possibly unfair, but she accepts that there is no alternative to playing shows, and so she is getting better at it. She likes to perform in front of a powerful fan, which blows back her hair to create a small-budget version of a big-budget music video. “I’m shocked that more people don’t use fans,” she says. And she makes sure that her guarantee is big enough to pay for professional dancers, whose exertions allow her to concentrate on knob-twiddling, singing, or moving, as necessary.
Her tour with Lana Del Rey, this summer, paired her with another great music-maker who is more excited about recording than about performing live. Del Rey was scalded, early in her career, by an unsteady “Saturday Night Live” performance that was widely panned. (In an e-mail that was supposed to be private, the news anchor Brian Williams famously called it “one of the worst outings in SNL history.”)But, a year after the release of her major-label début, a remix of one of its songs caught on in Europe, and eventually made the Top Ten in the U.S. Her success demonstrates how unpredictable the making of a pop star can be. Like Boucher, Del Rey doesn’t have any obvious predecessors. And, like Boucher, Del Rey has inspired a cult of fans online, attracted to both her music and her persona—in Del Rey’s case, an inventive mixture of old-Hollywood glamour and post-hip-hop decadence. In the modern, low-friction music industry, listeners are easy to reach but hard to retain. Clicking on a song doesn’t necessarily inspire a listener to do any biographical research; it may be easier than ever to record a popular song without becoming popular yourself. That makes charismatic singers like Del Rey, and perhaps Boucher, particularly valuable: they have a knack for turning listeners into fans.
On one of the hottest days of the summer, the tour arrived at Jiffy Lube Live, a pavilion in exurban Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. The crowd was mainly young and female, and many of the attendees had dressed to reflect their fandom: some in flower crowns, for Del Rey, and others in dark colors, for Boucher. For this tour, Boucher had hired not just dancers but a backing vocalist, too: an emerging singer and songwriter known as Hana, who was positioned right next to Boucher and her keyboards, as if to emphasize that the star of the show was also—and perhaps mainly—a producer. Boucher danced along with her dancers and sang along with Hana, finding ways to slip her small voice beneath the big, thumping beats. (Boucher had reassembled many of her old songs so that they would be sturdy enough for big amphitheatre speakers.) After a few minutes, she called her tour manager over. At first, it looked as if Boucher were complaining about the sound mix, but the manager returned with a small black garbage can, to which Boucher addressed herself, as discreetly as possible, while the beats kept thumping.
Even the fans in the front, singing along, probably didn’t notice, and the ones who did surely didn’t mind: watching Boucher fight through adversity is in some ways more fun than watching her hit all her marks. But after the show, restless beside Brooks in her tour bus, Boucher was frustrated. “Normally, I just zone out, and I pretend to be someone else,” she said. “And today I couldn’t—I was too sick.” She says she suffers from a bacteria intolerance that makes it hard for her to digest food, and she had made the mistake of eating too close to showtime. “It wasn’t a Grimes show,” she said—the illness had made her too weak, and too self-conscious, to give herself over to the performance. “It was Claire pretending to be Grimes.”
Her mood and her health were much improved when the tour arrived in Charlotte, forty-eight hours later—on a good night, Boucher is proud of her live show, which is an important asset for any musician seeking converts. When Boucher joined 4AD, in 2011, she was excited—the label was the longtime home of the Cocteau Twins, the gentle but eerie Scottish band of the nineteen-eighties, which Boucher had first heard as a teen-ager. Nowadays, the balance of power has shifted: she looks first to her powerful management team, not to her label, when considering her next moves. “They didn’t sign Grimes because they want money,” she says, of Roc Nation. “They signed Grimes because they want to diversify. And they’re really adamant about me not feeling any pressure to do pop stuff.” Boucher appeals to music executives because she seems unusually equipped to navigate a changing industry. She has mastered the kind of radical transparency that social media rewards, and, equally important, she makes music cheaply and on her own—a do-it-yourself approach that can make more traditional business models seem bloated and obsolete.
Of course, Roc Nation believes, too, that some of Boucher’s new songs have a chance to succeed on the radio, which retains a surprising influence on the industry. One plan is to try to get a song onto rock stations this fall and then, next year, to launch a song into the pop mainstream. Boucher acknowledges that she is a long shot, and says that she would be satisfied if her new record were merely “a successful indie album.” But it would be slightly deflating if Boucher, after years of pop obsession, didn’t find a way to become part of the thing that has captivated her.
If the time that Boucher spent in the Montreal underground taught her to appreciate mass culture, the time she has spent in Los Angeles, dodging condescending producers and scheming executives, has taught her how much she identifies, still, with her countercultural roots. The more pop she gets, the more punk she seems. There is a difference, Boucher has learned, between thinking that Mariah Carey is awesome and actually wanting to be Mariah Carey, which would require compromises she is unwilling to make. (Not to mention a singing voice that she doesn’t have.) On the bus, Boucher was pondering her live show again: she liked having professional dancers, but she wanted to make sure that her quirky performance—which looks, even now, like something you might feel lucky to stumble upon in a darkened loft—didn’t turn into a too-slick spectacle. “It can’t be full bullshit,” she said. “But there has to be a bit of bullshit.” ♦
Category:Interview
Category:2015